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2014
Adapting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:
Nostalgia for a Childhood at Never Was
Helen M. Bendix
Bard College
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Recommended Citation
Bendix, Helen M., "Adapting Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: Nostalgia for a Childhood 7at Never Was" (2014). Senior Projects
Fall 2014. Paper 42.
h8p://digitalcommons.bard.edu/senproj_f2014/42
Adapting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
Nostalgia for a Childhood That Never Was
Senior Project submitted to
The Division of Languages and Literature
and
The Division of Social Studies
Of Bard College
by
Helen Bendix
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York
December 2015
Acknowledgements
To Deirdre D’Albertis, for putting up with endless pages of drafts and always having something
encouraging to say
To Diana Brown, for asking me difficult questions and reassuring me I didn’t need to know all
the answers
To Maria Cecire, for always finding the sources that I needed
To my mother, for providing endless support and pictures of our cats when necessary
To my father, for giving advice and logistical aid
To my sister, for reminding me why I chose this instead of science
To Fabi, for listening to me complain
To Karen and family, for giving me a place to stay on holidays
To everyone at Bard who made being here unforgettable
And to everyone at home who made finishing up worth it
Thank you.
Table of Contents
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................1
1. “The Happy Hours of Childhood” ...........................................................................................5
1.1 Who is Alice, and Why Can’t She Remember Her Lessons? ................................................5
1.2 The Author and his Imagined Audience ..............................................................................10
1.3 Context and Text in a State of Mutual Affectation ..............................................................14
2. “I Must Have Changed Several Times Since Then” .............................................................26
2.1 “All in the Golden Afternoon” .............................................................................................26
2.2 “Some New Line of Fairy-Lore” .........................................................................................31
3. “What is the Use of a Book Without Pictures?” ...................................................................39
3.1 Knowing by Seeing: Illustration as an Epistemological Tool .............................................39
3.2 Reimagining the Author Through His Images .....................................................................47
3.3 The Film Industry, the 20
th
Century Child, and Alice ..........................................................52
3.4 A Very Unhappy Unbirthday – Alice’s Second Origin .......................................................57
4. “Some of the Words Have Got Altered” ................................................................................65
4.1 Alice Adaptation: Commonalities and Inconsistencies .......................................................65
4.2 “Narrativizing” – Plot Conventions in Film Media .............................................................75
5. “She, Too, Began Dreaming After a Fashion” ......................................................................83
5.1 Alice Fans Describe Themselves .........................................................................................83
5.2 “The Carrollians”: Consumers, Producers, and Interpretive Community ...........................91
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................................110
Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................113
Appendix A .................................................................................................................................121
Appendix B .................................................................................................................................137
Appendix C .................................................................................................................................147
1
Introduction
“He presented the green leather booklet containing the neatly handscripted text to Alice
in 1864 as a Christmas gift, a year and a half after the break with the Liddells” (Cohen
126).
Morton Cohen, a leading biographer of Lewis Carroll, describes the first edition of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (then titled Alice’s Adventures Underground) thus: a humble
gift to the daughter of an estranged friend. More than that, a painstakingly handcrafted gift; a
personal token. The sort of writing, in essence, which rarely achieves the level of commercial
success Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland did. One would think its lasting cultural impact and
maintained popularity would be equally unlikely for such a personal work, but considering other
works of children’s literature released after Alice, a trend is evident. Peter Pan, Winnie the Pooh,
and even in a way C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books all reveal direct connections between an adult
author and a child subject who became a focal point in the books, the Llewelyn Davies boys for
J. M. Barrie, his own son for A. A. Milne, and children who were evacuated to his house during
World War II for C. S. Lewis.
The personal level these books are imbued with provides the impression of something
readers long for – a direct link between author and audience, an intent on the author’s part
unrelated to commercial success, an authenticity to the textual object as an artifact created out of
love and without agenda. Alice stands out as a forerunner among these, being the first, but also
being the most frequently adapted. All four works were popularly adapted by the Walt Disney
company, though the Narnia movies were live-action and released significantly later, while the
other three were animated films released in the 1950s. And yet, only Peter Pan can boast
anything approaching the wealth of adaptation Alice enjoys, and even then, most of these follow
the formula of Disney’s version.
2
What is it about these books in particular that has sparked such a response, lasting a
century and a half? The obvious commonality lies with their authors – biographical work on both
Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie has debated back and forth about the relationship of the authors
with their child subjects for the last several decades. Alice’s popularity, then, is not only
predicated by its humble origins, but also by questions surrounding it. This is exacerbated by two
further facets of Alice. Firstly, the time in which it was created – the Victorian era, a time period
rich in development in terms of the perspective on children and childhood, which has since been,
ironically, romanticized and understood through literary works of the time, Alice foremost
among them. Secondly, Alice is a text rich in images, first hand-drawn by Carroll himself in the
edition he gave Alice Liddell for Christmas. Later, when the book was published commercially,
John Tenniel provided illustrations. The images and the text are placed on equal footing,
especially to child readers, who may form a stronger attachment to images if they cannot read
yet. In later versions, the implications of Alice as an entirely visual medium in film or illustration
will come to the fore.
In order to approach the question of why a book like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
stays relevant and subject to frequent revision, a certain acknowledgement of the unbelievable
scope of the question is necessary. I chose to approach the subject by first discussing how it stays
relevant. The components, quotes and tropes of Alice are very distinct, iconic even, making a
reference to Alice easy to spot and an adaptation of Alice guided by a set of standard,
recognizable features. Tracing Alice’s influence as both a written and visual medium since its
birth in 1865 reveals a rich history of literary works, scholarly analysis, film adaptation and
transformative work released online. The basis of this influence is revealed in a number of ways
– originally, in Carroll’s own stated desire to counter the didactic trends of children’s literature
3
and education at the time he was writing, giving Alice both a place in literary history and a status
out of time as a book formed without the desire or intention for fame or a place within a canon,
ironically given a place as a forming part of the canon of children’s literature for exactly this
reason.
A century and a half later, Alice fans globally still read, enjoy and respond to Carroll’s
original work, but more than that, they respond to a myriad of other works released in the
interim, based on or inspired by Carroll’s original work. Furthermore, they create their own
works, they interact with scholarship on the subject, and they state, frequently and clearly, their
own stakes in scholarly debates surrounding Alice and, more frequently, Carroll himself. The
developments leading to this point can be traced in a number of different ways, through the list
of film adaptations of Alice, the collected academic works on the subject, through the reactions
fans have to these works. In my project, I will begin by describing the circumstances of Alice’s
origins and discussing how the interpretation thereof has changed in recent years. I will discuss
the adaptations of Alice which are most well-remembered and examine how the trends in
portraying Alice have shifted over the years, and I will conclude by situating these trends among
their modern audience with the help of a survey I conducted among Alice fans.
These adults looking back at Alice, though nowadays they first encountered it as a film,
usually the Disney one, express a longing for the idyll they see Alice representing – a type of
childhood that Alice has come to represent that existed neither in the Victorian period nor even
within the book itself, but which has been collectively imagined by audiences for decades.
Filmmakers recreate Alice in film over and over, searching for a version that captures the
innocence they see in the original; bloggers claim Carroll’s words for their own biographies and
analyze his with a fine-toothed comb. Alice is a focal point of nostalgia both for a historical
4
period and for a collective notion of what childhood means, even when neither existed as they
are imagined. The rumors surrounding Carroll’s biography only exacerbate this – those who
believe them cite this as a cause to dismantle the aura of purity surrounding Alice, to form darker
and more adult adaptations. Those who believe in Carroll’s innocence refute the claims and
strengthen their ties to the understanding of an innocent childhood they pull from the text. Alice
becomes a child text rather than a children’s text, a space for competing claims on how nostalgia
and childhood ought to be understood.
What is at stake in this analysis is not necessarily reaching a comprehensive answer as to
how and why Alice became the phenomenon it is today. Rather, through the points of focus set in
academic work discussing Alice, the trends within adaptation of Alice and the way fans speak
about Alice, I hope to begin providing an overview of the how and a few indicators as to the why
at least among Alice fans. In this process, my main goal is to establish how changing
understandings of a text and the themes of said text, in this case childhood, change the way a text
is understood. In a way, this then means that the interpretive community reading Alice defines
the book, but they define it in such a way that to them, it also becomes a definition of childhood,
especially female childhood in Victorian England. This definition might not be accurate either to
Victorian England or to childhood as this community of readers experienced it themselves, but it
is taken as true in order to not destabilize the emotional attachment to the book. Alice is
redefined over and over by the context in which she is read, but she is presented by her readers as
a pure, unchanging object of nostalgia in order to disguise the broader cultural changes
‘childhood’ and ‘nostalgia’ are undergoing.
5
1. “The Happy Hours of Childhood”
1
1.1 Who is Alice, and Why Can’t She Remember Her Lessons?
“I must have been changed for Mabel! I’ll try again and say ‘How doth the little – ‘, and
she crossed her hands on her lap, as if she were saying lessons, and began to repeat it, but
her voice sounded hoarse and strange, and the words did not come the same as they used
to do. (Carroll 23)
What child, when faced with an unfamiliar situation as Alice is here, immediately begins
to question who she might have been turned into? Why would a child so unsure of herself and so
fixated on her lessons capture the imagination of the world? What exactly is it about Alice that
makes her so inescapably compelling? I do not claim to be able to answer any of these questions
fully over the course of this chapter, but they lie at the core of the material I will examine. Alice
emerges from the intersect of the education her author, Lewis Carroll, received, as well as the
treatment of children he observed over the course of the 19
th
century. It is this context which I
establish in order to understand Alice’s focus on her lessons, and her inability to remember them.
This is only one side of the story, however – as much as Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland is influenced by the historical circumstances surrounding its inception, the way it is
perceived now is influenced by current beliefs about that historical circumstance. Through both
these layers of historical understanding, the role of the child at the time and the belief in who the
child is at a fundamental level becomes intertwined, leaving the heavy weight of multiple
contexts and multiple perceptions resting on Alice’s shoulders. Perhaps, then, it is lucky that
Alice doesn’t know who she herself is, that she confuses herself so easily with Mabel, that she
doesn’t recognize her own voice when she tries to speak. Her undefined self is exactly what
allows her author and her readers to see in her what they need to.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a unique piece of writing. The trend
1
Carroll describing Alice as a character in his article “Alice on the Stage” (qtd. in Gardner 12)
6
of children’s literature, now ubiquitous, was only just beginning when Alice was released, and
was at the time largely dominated by didactic work. Alice, written by Charles Dodgson, alias
Lewis Carroll, and illustrated by John Tenniel, was published in 1865. While technically, the
first edition, Alice’s Adventures Underground, was a hand-bound, hand-written gift from Carroll
to Alice Liddell in 1862, by the time the first copy was sold, the text had undergone a series of
significant changes. It had been illustrated extensively by Tenniel, already a well-known artist in
his own right, to Carroll’s painstaking specifications (cf. Cohen 129); it had been retitled Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland, and Carroll had significantly expanded the content, including new
scenes, including the Mad Tea Party.
The second edition, the first having been recalled due to Tenniel’s protest at the
“disgraceful printing” (Cohen 130), sold far better than expected by both writer and publisher,
and received “unconditional praise” (Cohen 131) from the press. Morton Cohen, a leading
Carroll biographer, cites largely positive reviews, such as the Reader calling Alice an “artistic
treasure” (qtd. in Cohen 131) or the Guardian declaring it “so graceful and full of humour that
one can hardly help reading it through” (qtd. in Cohen 131). Jackie Wullschläger, meanwhile,
reports that the books’ critical reception was “luke-warm” (Wullschläger 54). Either way, the
book sold astonishingly well, though its success was slower and conveyed more by word-of-
mouth than would be the case with a modern bestseller. The success of the first book prompted
Carroll to write its sequel, five years later – Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found
There. Once again, the book was greeted with both critical and commercial success, and, if
Cohen is to be believed, little controversy at the time of its release.
What about this book made it so successful not only as fantasy but also as a staple classic
in children’s books? The first place to examine this is to see what within the text has made it so
7
approachable for a child audience. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland begins with the act of
reading, though it is not Alice who is doing it. Her sister, with whom she is sitting by the
riverbank, is reading a book that Alice is disinterested in because “it had no pictures or
conversations in it” (Carroll 11); she cannot see the point of such a book. Alice is, according to
Through the Looking-Glass, seven and a half years old (cf. Carroll 209), so perhaps too young
for a book without pictures or even a book as complex as Alice’s Adventures. At any rate, this
opening cements Alice as an ideal reader for her own story; it has both endless amounts of
dialogue as well as memorable, unique (for the time) illustrations with an integral place in the
text. It also contains some stylistic inventions of Carroll’s to make the text more appealing, for
example the mouse’s tale. Here, a mouse Alice encounters tells a story that, on the page, takes
the shape of a mouse-tail
2
. Additionally, the whole book is episodic, each chapter featuring a
new selection of bizarre Wonderland characters unrelated to the previous ones. The lack of
continuity and heavily visual orientation of the book could be seen as more child-friendly –
depending, of course, on the child and the understanding of child-friendliness in both Carroll’s
society and that of the reader.
In the specific instance of the mouse’s tale, Alice is shown to not be a good reader – the
mouse reaches the end of his tail tale only to tell her she is “not attending” (Carroll 35). Alice
apologizes profusely, but grows frustrated that the mouse is so “easily offended” (Carroll 36).
Her poor reading is also evidenced by her muddling recollections of her lessons, perhaps to say
Alice is not terribly good at paying attention to her sister’s book, her own lessons, or the
Mouse’s lesson. She is concerned with what she perceives to be the proper way to behave, but in
a parody of the manners central to the education of young ladies at the time, consistently offends
2
See: Appendix A, Fig. 1 and Fig. 3
8
the creatures of Wonderland – after offending the Mouse, when she meets the Caterpillar she
again wishes she could speak to him without causing offense so easily (cf. Carroll 54). Cohen
sees her as “mirror[ing] her society” (Cohen 137) by showing the type of behavior she sees in
adults to, making Alice’s Adventures something of a learning treatise on the rudeness of adult
behavior and the difficulties faced by the child in Victorian England.
Alice as a book is situated as a text children can enjoy by virtue of both textual traits and
illustrations making it more accessible to children. Alice as a character is situated as a child who
is not good at reading, placing her as a reactive element within the story. This reading disregards
the dream facet of the story; at Carroll’s time, Freudian dream analysis was not yet heard of at
all. Alice’s sister discounts the dream, and thus the entirety of Wonderland, as essentially
ambient noise at the end of the book, saying that even if she were to have this dream herself,
upon awaking “the rattling teacups would change to the tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen's
shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd boy” (Carroll 131). In the interim, psychoanalysis has
informed many critics’ reading of the text. In Nina Auerbach’s reading, she treats the various
elements of Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world as facets of Alice’s own personality.
Especially the animals reveal Alice’s inner conflict – “While Dinah (Alice’s cat in the real
world) is always in a predatory attitude, most of the Wonderland animals are lugubrious victims;
together, they encompass the two sides of animal nature that are in Alice as well” (Auerbach 36).
One of the main ways in which Alice estranges the characters she meets, especially in the earlier
parts of Wonderland, is by mentioning Dinah and her skills at chasing rats. If the Wonderland
animals that are frightened of Dinah’s mere mention as well as the undoubtedly threatening,
murderous characters such as the Queen of Hearts are both read as parts of Alice’s subconscious,
Alice is granted much more subtlety and depth as a character than other women and children
9
represented in Victorian fiction. (cf. Auerbach 47). Whether or not Carroll intended her to be
read as such is an entirely different matter.
On the other hand, Carroll was fairly clear about the role of didacticism in his own
writing – namely, that it was not relevant at all, at least for children (this does not mean that
adults couldn’t learn from Alice’s struggles). In fact, Carroll protested against critical attempts to
bring a sense of order into Alice fairly vehemently, saying that “the “why” of this book cannot,
and need not, be put into words. Those for whom a child’s mind is a sealed book […] would read
such words in vain” (qtd. in Cohen 135). Carroll objects to the need for learning to define the
process of reading, allowing the pleasure of the text to supersede any discussion of long-term
benefit. Beyond that, in this statement, Carroll also presents a parallel between a book and a
child’s mind, embodying the objectification of children that historian Marah Gubar considers
central to the Victorian cult of the child. In context with viewing Alice as a pleasure artifact
rather than an educational one, the same could be said of the child’s mind, in that to Carroll it
exists to enjoy and be enjoyed.
If Alice is supposed to be an object containing the essence of childhood, first to Carroll
and now to the reader, rather than becoming a complex figure with motives and power within the
narration understandable to adults, she becomes allergic to analysis. Perhaps this is why Alice’s
poor skills as a reader and difficulties in social situations are never painted as a bad
characteristics on her part, rather as one she cannot control – she herself cannot analyze
situations accurately because she, as a child, is not meant to. It could be said this is because Alice
is more object than person, parroting lessons and manners she has learned, a sort of model of
proper behavior gone awry. This would reflect back to James Kincaid’s standpoint on the subject
of the construction of the child; to him “any image, body, or being we can hollow out, purify,
10
exalt, abuse, and locate sneakily in a field of desire will do for us as a ‘child’” (Kincaid 5). In
this interpretation, Alice becomes less a person than an empty container of ideas – purity,
innocence, education, behavior and misbehavior. Nonetheless, it remains important that she is a
child, and a famous one at that. This role placed on her by her adult author makes her distinct
from all other literary characters interpreted as having an agenda. In a more positive light, it
could also simply be said that her (mis)adventures portray what Carroll saw as intrinsic
“divinity” (qtd. in Cohen 135) of childhood, removed from the society that is attempting to mold
it into something it isn’t. Alice, crystallized out of Carroll’s ideals of literature as well as the
concept of childhood as it was perceived in Victorian times and the developments in that
construct up until today, is a mirror image for what we want to read in her.
1.2 The Author and his Imagined Audience
Given its influence on the content of Alice, where exactly did Lewis Carroll’s beliefs about
childhood and literature emerge from? In many ways, the text was also a product of Charles
Dodgson’s own life as an academic in the Victorian era. Dodgson, hereafter referred to by his
chosen pseudonym Carroll
3
, began writing poetry and nonsense early on in his life (cf. Cohen
13). He was the eldest of many siblings and was often charged with caring for younger family
members, leading to his lifelong affinity for children and interest in entertaining them. In terms
of his academic interests, Carroll became a lecturer of mathematics in Oxford as well as a tutor
for a variety of his child-friends; many of the math games and logic puzzles in Alice stem from
this interest. Alice, then, is an educational text in some sense of the word. Especially the first two
chapters of the book, when Alice first falls down the rabbit-hole and then undergoes a number of
3
While some biographers, notably Morton Cohen, chose to refer to him as “Charles” or “Mr.
Dodgson”, I have decided to refer to him as “Carroll” as I am looking at him in his capacity as an
author rather than at his personal life.
11
size changes, feature her struggles with remembering her lessons. She begins multiplying
incorrectly, only to stop herself by saying “oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate”
(Carroll 23). Martin Gardner explains in the annotations to Carroll’s text that this could be a
reference to the standard multiplication tables, which “stops with the twelves” (Gardner 23). It
could also be a reference to a more complex mathematical phenomenon in which multiplying the
numbers Alice lists using “a number system with base 42” (Gardner 23), which would not
function with 20. Not only does this serve as an inside joke for mathematicians, it also showcases
Alice’s concept of learning or, more generally, the Victorians’ attitude towards education – it
functions by rote and recitation, and impossibilities are swept aside rather than examined.
Carroll, having both received a Victorian education as well as provided many, given that he
worked as a private tutor for children and an Oxford don, had extensive experience with the
process of education. Though he did have and state a number of problems with didacticism in
literature, he also practiced it in life and was aware of its ramifications and the influence it had
on children, a facet very central to Alice. That is to say, Alice as a character is very much
influenced by Victorian standards of education even if Alice as a book is not meant to be
educational.
Much of both Alice in Wonderland as well as Through the Looking-Glass center on
recitation. Beyond the iconic passages in which Alice misremembers poetry, in these first two
chapters she also contemplates geography, though she cannot remember what longitude and
latitude mean (cf. Carroll 13) or which city is the capital of which country (cf. Carroll 23). In a
way, the academic failure is central to Alice’s experience of Wonderland. The confrontation of a
child with a world in which the lessons from the schoolroom cannot be recalled and would not
apply anyway in some ways mirrors the experience of a child in the adult world. In Morton
12
Cohen’s biography of Lewis Carroll, his analysis of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is in part
that “the child is at the heart of both stories, as are the child’s observations of […] the adult
world’s insensitive, abusive treatment of the child” (Cohen 137). To Cohen, this style of writing
– complex in language at times, but ultimately meant for children – showcases that Carroll
“keenly appreciated what it was like to be a child in a grown-up society” (Cohen 144). In
essence, in terms of the connection between Alice and the typical Victorian child, Cohen paints
the treatment of children as a dark and gloomy trend of didacticism and Carroll as an
illuminating savior whose insight into the whimsy and fantastical nature of a child’s mind
provided an “antidote” (Cohen 144) to their usual treatment by adults.
Whether or not Carroll was indeed as harsh a critic of child-rearing standards of the time
as Cohen believes, he was not only interested in that aspect of Victorian culture. As an academic,
he was deeply immersed in the political life of the university as well as wider political issues.
Some of the political issues of Carroll’s formative years included the Opium War, parliamentary
reform and the abolition of slavery in the colonies (cf. Cohen 5). While it would be a stretch to
discover any of these as themes in Alice, there exists a certain trend towards viewing single
characters within the book as references to real political or university figures, i.e. Bill the Lizard
4
as Benjamin Disraeli. The presence of these stand-ins for political figures as well as the rhymes
and poems Alice unintentionally satirizes especially in Wonderland and, to a lesser degree, in
Through the Looking-Glass, are remnants of Victorian interests.
Gardner notes that “with few exceptions the originals have now been forgotten, their
titles kept alive only by the fact that Carroll chose to poke fun at them” (Gardner 23) in reference
4
Bill the Lizard appears in the fourth chapter of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as one of the
Rabbit’s gardeners; he gets sent up the roof to slide down the chimney, and Alice kicks him back
up.
13
to the poems satirized in Alice. For instance, the song the Duchess sings in chapter six, beginning
with “speak roughly to your little boy” (Carroll 64) is cited as a reference to a “happily
unremembered” (Gardner 64) poem presumably penned by David Bates entitled “Speak Gently”.
The fact that not even the author of this poem can be entirely verified at this point, though the
version Carroll wrote is still known shows the lasting presence of Carroll’s work in popular
culture. “Speak Roughly” might not even be as well-known as “How Doth the Little Crocodile”
or “You Are Old, Father William”, other poems parodied in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,
and its source may be even obscurer, but it is still occasionally included in film adaptations. Its
content, insisting that children must be treated roughly at all times and punished severely, speaks
to a general idea of parody of Victorian treatment of children, almost making the books more
palatable to modern readers who would reject standards of behavior involving corporal
punishment which were acceptable in Carroll’s times. The Victorian in-jokes and parodies are
painstakingly explained in the Annotated Alice, but have become obscure for most children or
casual readers of the book without annotation; the book has far eclipsed its context, but its
context is remembered through it as a quaintly repressive era. The parody becomes a way to
understand and accept what might otherwise be unacceptable about the time period.
Carroll’s life experience in Victorian England thus provides a host of material now fairly
foreign to readers not well-versed in it. In many other works, this could make it dated, but for
Carroll, there was more at stake than only his context, there was also his imagined audience –
children. Carroll was a friend to and champion for children. He was a great admirer of Tennyson
(cf. Cohen 260), a romantic poet who had much to say on the subject of the innocence of
14
childhood, but succeeded in alienating him upon their meeting
5
. Carroll also possessed a number
of views on appropriate material for children, advising an actress who was a former child friend
to “improve [the] material” (Cohen 298) of Shakespeare to make it more appropriate, i.e.
bowdlerize it. Carroll’s child-friends – children of acquaintances or even children he met by
chance and formed friendships with – included children from all walks of life, the Liddell
children being higher-class and better educated than some, but by no means out of the norm of
his social circle. In terms of his relationship to Alice herself, in his later article, “Alice on the
Stage” (1887), Carroll indeed described Alice with all the hyperbole of his contemporaries, the
romantic poets. According to Carroll, Alice was “with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes
only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but
names – empty words, signifying nothing!” (qtd. in Auerbach 32). Whether he was here referring
to Alice Liddell or the fictional Alice remains unclear, especially given that over twenty years
had passed since he wrote the book, and even more time had passed since he had been close with
the Liddells. What is clear in this quote is that, to some extent, Alice the character embodied an
idealization of childhood that, while wildly affectionate towards the child, somewhat diminished
the belief in the child’s capacity for emotion.
1.3 Context and Text in a State of Mutual Affectation
The final puzzle piece in looking at the context of Alice’s creation lies in looking beyond the
world of her creator and her content at the broader world surrounding childhood and family at
the time. In some ways, this context influenced Alice, in others, it influenced the reception of a
book like Alice. The intense shifts occurring politically and socially regarding childhood made
5
According to Cohen, Tennyson’s wife accused Carroll of ungentlemanlike behavior when he
received an unpublished copy of Tennysons’s poetry and asked permission to read and
disseminate it amongst his friends. This caused Carroll to become affronted and the two writers
became estranged (cf. Cohen 261).
15
space for a work as unheard of as Alice. Likewise, the fondness with which the Victorian era is
now remembered at least in the English-speaking world allows for a mutually affective
relationship between how Alice is perceived and how Victorian times are perceived to decide the
role the book takes in modernity. Thus, the question of what childhood and children’s literature
meant at the time arises in order to analyze the role this influence had both on how the text was
formed and on how it is now perceived.
The difficulty in analyzing the role of the child in Victorian England is twofold (at least).
Firstly, the Victorian period encompassed nearly a century, during which attitudes towards
childhood and child-rearing changed dramatically. Secondly, this period was marked by dramatic
differences along the lines of class stratification. Alice as a character is well-mannered, in the
process of being educated, and well-dressed, judging by Tenniel’s illustrations. She does not
behave or speak in a way a working class or even lower-middle-class child would: she has an
extensive vocabulary and keeps to a strict set of rules. She also exhibits a slightly spoiled,
petulant manner, which ultimately shows her to be accustomed to a standard of interaction
dictated by a codified set of rules. This indicates that she is at the very least from a wealthy
middle-class family. Moreover, in Nina Auerbach’s words, “Alice herself, prim and earnest in
pinafore and pumps, confronting a world out of control by looking for the rules and murmuring
her lessons, stands as one image of the Victorian middle-class child” (Auerbach 31) to a modern
reader.
Ginger Frost’s Victorian Childhoods shows that the notion of family at the time was
characterized by an idealization of the family featuring a “glorification of parental roles, for men
and for women” (Frost 3) and a strong emphasis on raising children. This is unsurprising, given
that “in 1841, 36.1 percent of the population was younger than fifteen” (Frost 3). According to
16
law, children came of age at 21. While the actual definition of the boundary between childhood
and adulthood was not as simple as the law suggested, this does show that a significant portion of
the population was composed of children by most definitions. Working class children began
working long before they came of age (though child labor laws were a topic of much debate and
were instituted towards the end of the Victorian era), while middle-class children would finish
school or occupational training in their mid to late teens, if, of course, they were male.
Additionally, “childhood lengthened during the course of the nineteenth century, too, so late
Victorian childhoods were different from early Victorian ones” (Frost 4). Alice, being
presumably middle or upper class and seven years old in a book published in 1865, would thus
have been deeply involved in schooling, which, as has already been established, forms an
important part of her characterization.
Frost focuses on the differences between Victorian childhoods based on class, gender, and
the progression of the concepts “family” and “childhood” throughout the 19
th
century. In terms
of the structure enabling family lives, she shows that in working class families, surroundings
were characterized in autobiographies of children growing up at the time as “tight spaces with
minimal privacy” (Frost 13) and minimal hygiene, leading to the fact that despite careful
attention to infants, child mortality was very high. In poor districts, “25 percent of children were
gone by five years old” (Frost 12). By contrast, middle and upper class people had not only the
space for a modicum of privacy and hygiene; they also had the “income and leisure to pursue
family lives as they pleased” (Frost 21). Additionally, they tended towards having fewer children
than the lower classes, given that the costs of educating an upper class child were significantly
higher. In all walks of life, strong bonds between siblings were encouraged, in the lower classes
17
frequently by virtue of older children becoming caretakers for younger children (cf. Frost 13)
and in the other classes simply as the most socially acceptable playmates.
Much of Frost’s emphasis rests on the role of the parents, citing 19
th
century politician
H.A.L. Fisher’s description of his mother’s life as “a perpetual surrender of ease and comfort to
the service of others” (qtd. in Frost 24) a fairly standard portrayal of mothers as domestic
goddesses. Fathers, on the other hand, were providers, “they were revered as the heads of the
households, and their needs came first” (Frost 24). Though she mentions the presence of nannies
as the main force in educating and raising small children in the middle and upper classes, Frost
emphasizes the bond between parents and children, focusing more on the reverence children
were expected to hold towards to their parents than vice versa. These traits are more elusive in
Alice, as Alice’s parents do not appear at all, nor are they mentioned. Alice’s sister is mentioned
in the opening and closing of the first book, but Alice doesn’t think or speak of her whilst in
Wonderland, a sign that in these books, the structure of Victorian society is being subverted
somehow.
Another major feature in child-rearing which is far more noticeable in Alice is the role of
discipline, which held a significantly different role in Victorian England than it does today. Frost
acknowledges that the punishments doled out by parents “border[…] on negligence to modern
eyes” (Frost 27), though at the time parents believed they were teaching the valuable skills of
piety, self-discipline and outward stoicism in the face of discomfort to their children. While
corporal punishment was a part of this, especially middle class parents preferred punishment
“through love and guilt rather than blows” (Frost 26), as well as using “religious training and
repentance to impress on children the need for virtue” (Frost 26). Essentially, Frost argues,
parents used a combination of personal filial indebtedness and religious piety to encourage
18
certain behaviors and discourage others, and these forms of discipline formed a large part of the
relationship towards children held for much of the 19
th
century. Alice certainly appears to have
taken these lessons to heart. The importance she gives proper behavior is one of the major
themes of the book, and her distress at being unable to act appropriately is perhaps the greatest
source of emotional difficulty for her within the text. While neither her parents nor any particular
religious affiliation are mentioned, a strong sense of crime and punishment are traceable
throughout the books, culminating in a trial to the death over stolen tarts in the final chapter of
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Alice views her own bad behavior as a punishable offense,
frequently chastising herself. When the trial begins, however, she is quick to understand the
punishment as disproportional to the crime and interrupts the proceedings. One interpretation of
this could be Alice’s rejection of unfair discipline, and thus a rejection of Victorian standards of
parenting.
In terms of education received in school, the 19
th
century saw the beginning of widespread,
available schooling and literacy, though “reforms began slowly” (Frost 37) even after working-
class men gained the right to vote and petitioned for literacy. Among the lower classes, education
was fairly rudimentary, while middle- and upper-class students might be in school from the age
of seven until the age of twenty (cf. Frost 45). Here, gender was the main difference. “Girls
learned first at home, so the quality of their early education depended on the skills and attention
of nurses, nannies, and mothers” (Frost 49), as well as the contents of the family library. Even
after childhood, girls only began attending similar boarding schools as their brothers did towards
the end of the Victorian period. Their education was focused more on learning
“accomplishments”, e.g. “piano playing and French” (Frost 50). The difference between the
sexes decided not only a child’s education, but also leisure time – “girls had toys and games that
19
fitted them for their future in domesticity, most obviously dolls” (Frost 80). Ultimately, girls’
education was geared towards securing a marriage as opposed to taking up a profession. Alice,
being school-age, is more explicitly preoccupied with lessons from the classroom, such as maths
and geography, but it is likely that if the protagonist were a little boy, there would be half as
much agony over insulting Wonderland creatures with improper etiquette.
In sum, Victorian childhood can be seen in several ways in Alice. The most obvious of these
is that the text itself interacts with the standards of education for young children, with which
Lewis Carroll, as a clergyman’s son and an eldest sibling himself, was intimately familiar. Alice
frequently recalls her lessons, but always incorrectly and without much enthusiasm; Wonderland
inhabitants seem to know the poetry she attempts to recite, and correct her. The proper manners
Alice believes herself to be enacting correctly are not up to the standards of admittedly bizarre
and themselves incredibly impolite denizens of Wonderland; nor are their mocking jabs at
Victorian etiquette received well by Alice. Additionally, while Alice has a sister, the two barely
interact, and only share dialogue in the first and last pages of the book; in the sequel, the sister is
replaced by Alice’s cat Dinah and her kittens (in some sense treated as dolls in that Alice
mothers them). Alice’s parents are not even mentioned. The absence of parental figures and
familial relationships undermine or even reject much of what Ginger Frost sets up as the central
features of Victorian family life; perhaps they also contribute to why Frost’s emphasis on the
parental figures is surprising to modern readers. On the other hand, one of the main features in
Alice is the sense of estrangement Alice’s surroundings give her. She is separated from her life of
domesticity, and estranged from the lessons of her Victorian socialization, and encounters only
unfriendly, authoritative adults whose interactions with her she experiences as unpleasant and
20
demanding. This alone makes the book something of a reaction to the educational and domestic
standards of the Victorian era.
Alice was by no means the only work of literature in Victorian times to interact with the
concept of childhood, and this cannot be discounted as another point of influence for the text.
Frost described Victorian attitudes towards the family as having a “lack of a child-centered
approach” (Frost 166). This is an interesting turn of phrase given that romantic poets of the time,
e.g. Wordsworth and Tennyson, the former writing in the early 19
th
century and the latter in the
mid-to late years of it, were known for their writing on the subject of children. They frequently
portrayed them as “innocent creatures who should be shielded from the adult world and allowed
to enjoy their childhood” (Gubar). Similarly, Henry James’ Turn of the Screw, published in 1898
at the end of the Victorian era showed the progression of this literary trope to the point where
two children under the care of the narrating governess are either innocents to be protected (as the
governess believes) or themselves already corrupted by adult influences. A combination of the
two is not a possibility presented by the narrator, nor is an innate lack of innocence or goodness
in the children believed to be possible. Partially, these literary attitudes could be linked to the
political movements towards prolonging childhood through mandatory education and “attempts
to regulate child labor” (Frost 75).
Being published in 1865, Alice entered a literary world characterized by innocent children in
books for adults and largely moralizing and religious sentiments in books for children. Alice
herself straddles the line, poking fun at both tropes, the innocent child who can do no wrong
unless an adult told her to, and the child that really ought to have learned her lessons. At the
same time Alice embraces aspects of both tropes – revealing also that Alice’s Adventures might
have been a book for a child but that did not necessarily make it a children’s book. In the very
21
first chapter, “Down the Rabbit-Hole”, Alice stumbles upon a bottle labeled “Drink me” and,
while relaying Alice’s internal debating whether or not it is in fact safe to drink, the following
lines reveal a very pointed reference to the state of children’s books at the time.
“No, I’ll look first,” she said, “and see whether it’s marked poison’ or not; for she had read
several nice little stories about children who had got burnt, and eaten up by wild beasts, and
other unpleasant things, all because they would not remember the simple rules their friends
had taught them: such as, that a red-hot poker will burn you if you hold it too long; and that,
if you drink much from a bottle marked “poison,” it is almost certain to disagree with you,
sooner or later. (Carroll 17)
In this section, Alice herself does not mock the tropes and conventions of Victorian literature.
Far from it – she seems to take the “nice little stories” at face value. The narrator, however, does
not, using the turn of phrase “nice little stories” in reference to tales in which children die violent
deaths for not doing as they’re told makes the matter-of-fact presentation of the moral lessons
seem fairly sarcastic
6
. More than that, this passage also reveals that while the narrator is perhaps
a touch more dubious about actions and their consequences, relaying Alice’s thought process in a
semi-ironic tone, Alice herself views being “eaten up by wild animals” as perfectly just
retribution for not listening to good advice. In a way, Carroll’s writing here both satirizes the
heavy morality which was part and parcel of Victorian children’s literature and education, and
simultaneously reifies its solidity in the child’s mind, demonstrating the influence education
holds while critiquing the forms it took at the time. This tension between the image of Alice as
an integral part of a literary canon of little girls who “suggest […] the self-containment of
innocence and eternity” (Auerbach 31) while also revealing the innate brutality that was part of
6
The reference to “children who had got burnt” because they “would not remember the simple
rules their friends had taught them” may be an allusion to the Struwwelpeter (1845), a German
collection of stories by Heinrich Hoffman which was one of the earliest widely marketed (and
translated) picture books. It is comprised of a series of stories in which disobedient children die
fairly gruesomely after having been warned about their misbehavior and persisting in it
nonetheless.
22
their education and thus personalities becomes the central psychological conflict of the text
according to Nina Auerbach’s “Alice and Wonderland: A Curious Child”.
Finally, the historical developments taking place between Carroll’s early life and his writing
of Alice’s Adventures in the early 1860s meant that the duration and concept of childhood had
perhaps already lengthened and shifted. Alice Liddell, the daughter of an Oxford don who
himself was descended from nobility, was from a wealthier background than Carroll; she had
fewer siblings and was the third-eldest, relieving her of many of the responsibilities of the older
siblings. She certainly received some form of education, as Carroll’s immediate function to the
Liddell children was as a tutor
7
, but as a girl, she neither attended boarding school nor had any
specific goals in her education beyond ultimately attracting a husband. She, unlike Carroll as a
child, had a significant amount of leisure time to spend on puzzles and games, as well as boat
rides on the Thames. This adds up to reveal that Alice, both in Wonderland and in the Liddell
family, had a very different childhood and indeed came from a different understanding of the
word “child” than Lewis Carroll did. In some ways, the child he was describing and the
definition of childhood she embodied might have been as foreign to Carroll as they are to a
modern reader, and thus equally fascinating to both.
Alice enters the world treading the uneasy ground as a book about children, for children, but
written by someone who had not been a child for a long time, had no children of his own, and
could have had a very different understanding of what childhood even meant than the child he
was writing for. Alice formed part of the basis for the budding genre of children’s literature, most
of which was encompassed by works treating the child subject with similar complexity. In an as-
7
He had met Henry Liddell, Alice’s father, in a professional context as they were both dons, and
the two had formed a friendship. Carroll expressed an interest in tutoring the Liddell children,
which Lorina, their mother, didn’t encourage. Carroll nonetheless persevered in tutoring them
when their parents left Oxford for a few weeks.
23
yet relatively undefined literary genre, it proved a lasting influence; prior to Carroll, works for
children were evaluated more in terms of functional value than as works of art. Jackie
Wullschläger, in her 1995 book Inventing Wonderland, examines the five Victorian and
Edwardian writers of children’s fantasy she views as having created the genre. She situates in the
nineteenth century “a growing sense […] of needs, desires, behavior and rights which were
distinctive to children” (Wullschläger 13), leading to enlarged empathy with children and
enabling the creation of the genre. At the very least, an enlarged empathy among adults was
created for what they viewed as childhood. James Kincaid’s Child Loving examines the manifold
comparisons in child-rearing manuals from the time of children to wax or other moldable
substances (cf. Kincaid 90), maintaining that children were to be both a mirror of the adults
raising them as well as a fundamental other; “If children were not bad, it would be impossible to
love them” (Kincaid 95). This means that children come with a manual of expected behaviors,
but that following that manual makes them inherently unchildlike; misbehavior is expected,
especially of boys, because the adult-child relationship depends on the schema of misbehavior
being followed by punishment and good behavior being followed by reward. Childhood,
according to Kincaid, is expected to be a process of shaping an adult product and if the process is
not visible or enacted, if the child does not require shaping, the adult’s role vanishes, leaving the
an unloveable and unraiseable child. In a way, it seems Carroll realizes this – Alice tries so hard
to fulfill every standard of behavior she has been taught, and all it does is alienate her further
from the adults she encounters. Carroll and his creations emerged, in the end, from a very
contradictory period in terms of the role of the child, in which childhood was highly valued but
ultimately highly performative, more interested in adults reactions to children than the children
themselves, and of these, only well-behave, clean, healthy, rich children. Alice herself often
24
showcases this, with her consistent desire to please whomever she encounters in Wonderland and
frequent frustration at her own inability to recite the correct poems or use the correct mannerisms
to do so.
Alice’s origins are a central part of how she is perceived today. Nostalgia for and interest in
previous times forms a significant part of popular culture, leading in part to the plethora of
adapted material. Alice takes a special role in this, as the Alice books emerged simultaneously
with the beginnings of the current understanding of childhood as well as the legal ramifications
which surround it. Alice, both as a character and as a real child, becomes the epitome of the
Victorian child, in part due to her iconic nature and in part due to her struggles to actually be a
child. As one of the benchmarks of children’s literature, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and
Through the Looking Glass are one of the earliest parts of this particular canon, and as such
contributed in no small way to the parameters and contents of future children’s literature. As
such, they frequently take on a nostalgic role in people’s lives – they remind not only of
historicity and Victoriana, but also evoke personal childhood memories in an adult readership,
both scholarly and otherwise. In a way, the term “Victorian childhood” comes to stand for a set
of assumptions which might not have a bearing on reality, and readers of Alice expect to find
these within the text. This shrouds the books in an almost folkloric light, connecting a deeply
personal literary experience with an understanding of history and the cultural concept of
childhood. It is no wonder that the many layers of meaning Alice is entangled in become a site
for adaptation – the personal value the books hold to readers in contrast to the concreteness of
their origins seem to inspire a desire to make them timeless by forming them into a mold relevant
to the adapter’s time over and over again. The act of adaptation enables the reclaiming or
refuting of a lost time and a lost childhood, neither of which are real in any place but the reader’s
25
mind – not that this in any way makes them less valuable. In order to further examine what about
Alice enables this complex relationship of adaptation, personal significance and historical
relevance, in chapter two I will be focusing on the mythologizing of the books’ origin story and
how this influenced the ease and frequency with which it has been adapted.
26
2. “I Must Have Changed Several Times Since Then”
8
2.1 “All in the Golden Afternoon”
9
Alice’s origin lies in the story of the first time Carroll told Alice to Alice Liddell,
informing the folktale aura surrounding not only the text but also subsequent adaptations and
retellings. In the poem prefacing the book, Carroll refers to the “golden afternoon” on the
Thames during which he told the story to the three eldest Liddell sisters, Lorina, Alice and Edith
(Carroll 7). This turn of phrase, intentionally or not, “dominates almost all contemporary
accounts of Alice’s origins” (Brooker 11). The date of the memorable afternoon, July 4
th
1862, is
verified, both in Carroll’s diary as well as in the account of Reverend Duckworth, who was the
final member of the party of the rowing expedition during which the story was told (Gardner 7f.).
According to Duckworth’s account, Carroll said, “I’m inventing as we go along” (qtd. in
Gardner 9), thus providing a basis for the story’s putative spontaneity and ingenuity. Carroll
himself describes Alice as something akin to fairy tales. Twenty-five years after the first
publication of Alice, Carroll writes that he invented the rabbit-hole story that afternoon “in a
desperate attempt to strike out some new line of fairy-lore” with “the cloudless blue above, the
watery mirror below” (qtd. in Gardner 8). Pointedly, Carroll does not claim that the entire story
was told that afternoon; as we have already seen, the tale underwent heavy editing between its
first edition as Alice’s Adventures Under Ground and its second as Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland. Many of the most iconic sequences were later additions. In fact, it is only Alice
Hargreaves’ statement, quoted by her son Caryl seventy years later which posits that “nearly all
of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground was told that blazing summer afternoon” (Brooker 15). The
8
Alice to the Caterpillar, explaining she might have known who she was this morning, but she
does not anymore (Carroll 49)
9
The first line of the prefatory poem to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll 7)
27
adult Alice’s claim was made after Carroll had passed away. Hargreaves herself was at this point
an octogenarian recalling events from her early adolescence.
Meteorological reports from the day and time (July 4
th
, 1862) as well as Carroll’s
personal diaries, in which he kept record of the weather, note that the day was most likely not at
all golden, but rather grey and overcast (cf. Gardner 9). This being known by most scholars who
work on the subject has in no way impeded the popularity of the myth; Martin Gardner, in his
annotations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, begins his paragraph on the subject of the poor
weather with “it is with sadness that I add” (Gardner 9), indicating a preference even by a scholar
for the image of the golden afternoon. In a certain sense, it doesn’t matter whether or not the
story was conceived spontaneously during a sunny or a cloudy boat ride on the Thames because
the image of that origin is now so deeply ingrained in the story. Why else would Morton Cohen,
as the first biographer to have full access to Carroll’s diaries and to realize several pages had
been cut out, begin his chapter on the Alice books by saying “it happened on that “golden
afternoon”” (Cohen 123) despite knowing (and stating later on) that the afternoon was not golden
and the story did not emerge in its entirety as we know it for a further three years? The word
“golden” has been taken in the meteorological sense especially after Alice Liddell calling it a
“blazing hot afternoon”, but also in the metaphorical sense of the pastoral idyll it paints.
“Golden” becomes in some sense a stand-in for untroubled and joyful memory, a shiny,
untarnished, pure time.
The idea of the book’s inception as an orally improvised tale with no further labor than
the spark of Carroll’s genius and the presence of Alice Liddell as his muse gives Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland at least a hint of the natural, the unstudied and the uncrafted. The
status of the first, hand-written draft of Alice’s Adventures Under Ground, illustrated and bound
28
by Carroll himself and given to Alice Liddell for Christmas, provides a sense of the personal and
intimate about the volume. The “authentic” first edition of Alice serves also as a point of origin
for readers and fans of Carroll’s invention. In as much as the books form a distinct break with
didacticism in children’s literature as well as serving, according to Helen Pilinovski’s essay
“Body as Wonderland”, “the fledgling genre of fantasy well” (Pilinovsky 178), the personal
dedication to a specific child lends the book much of its distinct flavor in popular culture.
“Authenticity” is a fraught word, especially when surrounded by words such as “folktale”
and “origin”
10
, but when one of the main interests in a book is unmediated access to a child
audience, believing that the child in question is not only a chimerical universal child but could in
fact be one specific real child focuses a collective nostalgia for childhood and origins on this one
story. Especially in the post-film industry world, in which a certain mistrust towards movies and
books as consumer products is taken for granted, a perhaps naïve view of the Victorian Era as
one of innocence (or at least repression) and the Alice books as personal and heartfelt rather than
mass-marketed is comforting.
While this is a very important factor, it is not only the notion of the book as emerging
from a spontaneous, emotionally laden place that gives it a connection to narrative as rooted in
the spoken form, connecting the personal encounter the story emerged from to the more
community-oriented idea of folk and fairy tales. It is also ingrained in the style of the books
themselves. Although Cohen’s biography of Carroll states that “above all, these books have no
moral” (Cohen 142), he contradicts himself on a number of levels here. Largely, this is due to the
10
In Jack Zipes’ Breaking the Magic Spell, he traces the origins of folktale themes from “Homer
and the Greek dramatists” (Zipes 7) onwards. Additionally, he shows that many compilers of
folktale collections, e.g. Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, were
working with similar source material, making the national claims to the individuality and
authenticity of their folktale canon very difficult to verify to say the least.
29
fact that he doesn’t establish what he means by “moral”. If he means that Alice’s Adventures
didn’t conclude with a didactic lesson on behavior, this is certainly accurate. If he means that the
story doesn’t come to a particularly satisfying conclusion wrapping up all of the confusing
threads of the book and stating a general theme, as is often the case with modern novels, a case
could be made for that
11
. If, however, Cohen means to say that nothing on the subject of self-
betterment can be learned from the Alice books, he certainly contradicts himself. Prior to this,
Cohen conducted a reading of the books as a coming of age narrative in which Alice ”succeeds,
but not through the formula of grand romance. Instead of honeyed happiness, she gains
confidence” (Cohen 139). Cohen finds “meaning” in a way not dissimilar to didactic literature.
The reading of Alice’s Adventures as a coming of age story is by no means uncommon;
particularly the sequence of events in Through the Looking-Glass which lead to Alice being
crowned as queen on the chessboard lends itself to this interpretation.
The folktale connotation provided by the oral origin of Alice and Carroll’s own statement
calling it “fairy-lore” provide an odd juxtaposition with the intense rejection of moral teaching in
the Alice books. This latter interpretation was the one Carroll himself favored, saying in the
same letter in which he advised a child to not read a book containing a moral that because of the
moral, the book was clearly “not by Lewis Carroll” (Letters to Child-Friends 34). Carroll’s
rejection of portraying his book as a learning experience points towards his break with the tropes
of children’s literature and the more heavy-handed aspects of child-rearing a the time. It also
breaks from the trope in fairy tales of providing a clear moral (for instance, the Brothers Grimm
tales often ending in rhyming couplets stating said moral). The presence of an undercurrent of
11
Alice’s Adventures ends with Alice waking up and realizing it was all a dream, telling her
sister about it and then running off. The final paragraph consists of the sister picturing Alice as
“a grown woman” (Carroll 132) telling her own children about Wonderland.
30
self-actualization and journey towards adulthood that can be read as a possible subtext of the
Alice books is nonetheless reminiscent of certain tropes of fairy tales, though more frequently
ones with male protagonists. The contradictory nature of both Carroll’s own view of his writing
and Cohen’s interpretation of it seems to flounder a little at the cross-section between the joy in
writing nonsense and creating a book meant for pleasure and the apparently diametrically
opposed notion of writing for the sake of edification. This could be counted as a byproduct of
Victorian education being significantly more draconian and less entertaining than schooling
nowadays; it could also simply be an author not entirely prepared for the depth of speculation
aimed at his work intended only to amuse one single child. It could also be that at the time, it
seemed impossible for a children’s book to be both enjoyable and educational. Equally, what
now may seem as a moral – the importance of independence as seen by Alice’s rejection of the
house of cards – may have then, in a time of far more explicit morals at the end of texts, been too
subtle to count as such.
The language of Alice is worth considering in this regard as it is the site for Cohen’s
interpretation of the books as a learning artifact. Cohen again brings in the concept of edification
here, saying that the narrator of the books “uses big, polysyllabic words, sophisticated concepts,
notions that a child cannot possibly be expected to grasp” (Cohen 142) but noting that the
episodic structure of adventures is easy to follow and thus the true intention of the book is to
educate in vocabulary and word games. This is certainly easily believed of Carroll, a tutor for
many of his child-friends, whom he often introduced himself to by way of puzzles he had made
himself (cf. Cohen 174). In conjunction with Alice’s struggles to achieve adequate social
behavior, the text could even be read as a children’s codebook for social behaviour. In his
chapter “Aspects of Alice”, Michael Hancher notes that perhaps Alice was never intended for
31
children to read alone for this precise reason; “having an adult mediate the story for a child can
resolve some aspects of the “readability” problem” (Hancher 200). Hancher also notes that the
narrator himself often serves this purpose, offering “helpful comments” (Hancher 201) and
glossing some of the more difficult words. However, being unresponsive to individual questions,
he is not as helpful as “an adult reader-aloud who impersonates the narrator” (Hancher 201), thus
not only bringing the story alive but, in fact, recalling Carroll’s “first telling of the story”
(Hancher 201). This brings the sequence of viewing the text as an oral artifact full circle, when
the act of reading it aloud is seen as in a way more authentic to its origin than regarding it as
simply text on a page.
2.2 “Some New Line of Fairy-Lore”
12
As we have seen, Alice’s relation to fairy tales is explicitly linked to a myth of origin.
The notion of an oral story, one that changed significantly between telling and retelling as Alice’s
Adventures Underground, and then changed again before becoming Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland, gives Alice a malleability, an innately transitive nature, that few works of literature
possess. In addition, it fulfills a number of tropes of fairy tales; Carroll, as well as outright
calling the book “some new line of fairy-lore” (qtd. in Gardner 8) admitted that he did not
entirely know if he could classify Alice as an original work, though he claims he was “no
conscious imitator in writing it” (qtd. In Sigler xviii). He says this against the backdrop of an
enormous influx of Alice-related material published after his books, which “alternately angered
and flattered” (Sigler xvii) him, well aware of both the influx of material he inspired and aware
of some accusations he himself was borrowing from previous “literary fairy tales” (Sigler xvii).
The temptation exists today to blame this interesting connection on the 1951 Disney movie,
12
Carroll about the creation of Alice in the article “Alice on the Stage” (qtd. in Gardner 8)
32
released during the original Disney heyday of animated musicals based on Grimm’s Kinder- und
Hausmärchen, easily confusing Alice as one of them. However, even beyond Carroll’s own
connection of the books to “fairy lore”, one of the first reviews of the book, published in the
Guardian in 1865, said of Alice that “a more original fairy tale […] it has not lately been our
good fortune to read” (qtd. in Cohen 131). Given that Grimm’s fairy tales had been released
nearly half a century earlier, the connection could and indeed was made at this time already
13
.
In ethnographic writing on the subject of folklore, the definitions of what exactly
comprises a folk or fairy tale are difficult to pin down. The word folklore itself originates from
the German Volkskunde, used first by the Brothers Grimm and then introduced in the English
language in 1846 by “an English antiquary, William John Thoms” (Dorson 1) as a replacement
for “popular antiquities” (Dorson 1). The transition away from “antiquities”, which implies a
fossilized, unchangeable nature to folklore, emerges from the time of the beginnings of
nationalism and a resurgence of medieval fairy tales for the modern bourgeoisie. This was
pioneered in Germany by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, and over the course of the following
century, folklore became a mutable cultural good which even had its own artistic merit beyond
enjoyment for the masses.
In Richard Dorson’s introduction to Folklore and Folklife, he describes the major subsets
of folklore after his notes on the origins and common usage of the term
14
. Of these, the closest
13
Which type of fairy tale is reflected in Alice is another question, however - where the fantastic
in Grimm’s fairy tales appears largely in the form of inheritance, i.e. a gift given by a parent or
elder, or curses and blessings by witches and good fairies, respectively, in Celtic mythology
frequently a child or young adult is kidnapped into a fairy realm which is as beautiful as it is
dangerous. The hero is often threatened by being forced to stay there by his own actions. This
type of fairy tale has arguably more in common with Alice than most of the stories in the
Grimms’ collection.
14
“To the layman, and to the academic man too, folklore suggests falsity, wrongness, fantasy,
and distortion. Or it may conjure up pictures of granny women spinning traditional tales in
33
relation to the folktale is the subdivision “folk narrative, which in turn has its own manifold
distinctions” (Dorson 2). Dorson speaks largely of folk narrative as an authorless, oral tradition,
which can take any literary form and also “frequently does enter into written literature” (Dorson
2). In terms of the use of folklore around the early to mid 19
th
century, the time just prior to
Carroll’s writing of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “scholars in one country of Europe after
another searched for the soul of the people revealed in the native dialects, the folktales and
folksongs carried in those dialects, the literature developing the themes of the folklore” (Dorson
20). Following the French Revolution in the late 18
th
century and the development of the nation
as a concept based on a communal identity, folklore became a way of historicizing these alleged
markers of nationality and creating a literal book of national values. The fact that many of these
national treasures appeared cross-culturally, i.e. variations of the same tale in multiple allegedly
national collections, seemed to matter little to the projects as a whole.
In Linda Dégh’s chapter Folk Narrative, she quotes Jakob Grimm’s statement “das
Märchen is poetischer, die Sage historischer” (Deutsche Sagen, 1816. Qtd. in Dégh 59). This
roughly translates to, “the fairy tale is more poetic, the legend historical”, and these definitions
have proved somewhat lasting. Dégh then proceeds to describe a series of tropes that typologize
the fairy tale, i.e. the framing through standard openings and endings such as “once upon a time”
(cf Dégh 60). To Dégh, the plot of the fairy tale features “an ordinary human being’s encounter
with the suprahuman world and his becoming endowed with qualities that enable him to perform
supernatural acts” (Dégh 63). The fairy tale then becomes a sort of escapist fantasy in which the
difficulties of the hero’s real life are subordinated to the new supernatural difficulties, and once
mountain cabins or gaily costumed peasants performing seasonal dances. In the present work,
folklore will mean both a field of learning and the whole subject matter of that field” (Dorson
1f.)
34
the latter are conquered the former cease to exist. To a certain extent, this can be applied to Alice,
at least the hero’s supernatural journey in which the rules of the real world do not apply.
The overarching plot of the fairy tale does not entirely apply to the book, given that Alice
does not begin the story with anything to overcome and doesn’t really have much by way of
stakes or character development. At least, this can be said of the original Alice – the Alices of the
20
th
century and onwards fulfill the hero’s journey criteria for a fairy tale far better. In film
adaptations, the chapter-by-chapter episodic nature of the story is replaced by some sort of goal
for Alice herself, at least, if not for the other characters or Wonderland as a whole. Thus it could
be said that while perhaps Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland does not stand on its own as a fairy
tale, popular conception of it as one due to a few common elements has led to adaptation pushing
it further and further into the narrative niche of fairy tales.
Another of Dégh’s criteria for the fairy tale which is far easier to spot in Alice is the use
of “the right formulas” (Dégh 61) to achieve the hero’s goals. Alice is something of a subversion
of this trope; she consistently misuses the formulas or cannot discover the correct ones. At the
end of Wonderland, she grows frustrated and accuses the Queen of Hearts’ court of being
“nothing but a pack of cards” (Carroll 129) rather than attempt to comply with their court and by
extension formulas. This is as close to a moment of self-actualization as Wonderland comes,
closing Alice’s hero’s journey in most adaptations. In Kincaid’s analysis, this is Alice gaining
“power to resist play” (Kincaid 290); a power she really had all along, namely to always decline
invitation and play by the strict rules of her upbringing, i.e. to be a child who always behaves.
This he had previously described as an “impossible [child] to love” (Kincaid 95). Perhaps this
somewhat unsatisfactory coming-of-age moment is so odd and out-of-place simply because Alice
has become a prim, female Peter Pan – unable to grow up for fear of ruining the magic. Perhaps,
35
on the other hand, the reader is always slightly against Alice and her proper ways, rooting instead
for the chaotic and ultimately more interesting Wonderland. At any rate, the themes align with a
fairy tale ending, though reception makes it seem like a subversion. Alice as a character stands
out from fairy tale characters, however, as being ultimately rewarded for misusing the formulas
as opposed to punished.
Jack Zipes, primarily a Grimm scholar, concurs with the term “fairy tale” as more of an
art than its antecedent the folk tale
15
. On the topic of the flood of folk-tale collection in the early
1800s, Zipes says that the collecting “was usually done by trained professionals who often
stylized the tales, changed them, or were highly selective” (Zipes 15). This indicates on Zipes’
part a certain presentation of the written fairy tales as inferior to their oral origins; he goes on to
claim that “the contents and structure of these saccharine tales upheld the Victorian values of the
status quo” (Zipes 15). The use of the word “saccharine” especially indicates that despite Zipes’
focus being on precisely the practices that led to the wide dissemination of fairy tales, he
maintains a certain disdain for their inauthenticity. He alleviates this tension by focusing on the
change in type of fairy tale: “Though the term Volksmärchen was retained, the nineteenth
century saw the creation of the Kunstmärchen and the relegation of the Volksmärchen to the
lower classes and the domain of the household and children” (Zipes 26)
16
. Zipes differentiates
fairy tales along not only historical lines but also by class lines, indicating that the Victorian era
saw a rise in fairy tales created by and intended for the growing middle class. This is certainly
applicable to Alice as a fairy tale; as shown previously, both the character Alice as well as
15
While Zipes establishes something of a difference between the two terms at the beginning of
Breaking the Magic Spell, he proceeds to use the terms somewhat interchangeably for the rest of
the book, making his notes on the subject of the difference between the two terms confusing.
16
“Volksmärchen” could be translated as “folk fairy tale”, while “Kunstmärchen” would be “art
fairy tale”.
36
Carroll himself were upper-middle-class and middle-class, respectively, and many of the
struggles of the book are middle-class preoccupations, while some of the fantastical elements and
themes hearken back to folk tale motifs. Thus, Alice, containing thematical elements related to
fairy tales as well as the social markers of a Kunstmärchen, is drawn into the genre of fairy tale
by virtue of association though the time it was published, a few striking commonalities, and most
importantly, its origin.
What these definitions hint at is the aura of communal property surrounding folktale as a
concept; folktales are authorless, belonging to both everyone who has heard or told them, and
simultaneously no one in particular. With an author who has become almost as strong a presence
as the book itself, this feat would seem almost unimaginable for Alice. However, adaptation of
Alice, despite Carroll’s fairly clear statements on whether or not this was a book that ought to be
analyzed, has over time created more and more layers of distance from the original work, to the
point of disassociating Carroll from the role of authorship and instead relegated him to becoming
almost a further fictional character, whose life story must be told in a way that allows for the
reading of his books that is presented either academically or in film to be acceptable. According
to Roland Barthes’s essay “The Death of the Author”, in modernity, “the prestige of the
individual” (Barthes 143) demands the presence of an author figure. Barthes criticizes this by
pointing out that the author then serves as a decoder ring of sorts for the entire text, which serves
only “to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified” (Barthes 147), subsuming
the author into the text. Carroll’s biography certainly has often been used as a catch-all method
for explaining Alice in some ways, and is more and more assimilated into the text.
Morton Cohen calls the books “a record of Charles [Dodgson]’s childhood” (Cohen 139);
meanwhile Brooker cites an early edition of the Annotated Alice in which Martin Gardner
37
commented that it could be said “that Carroll found an outlet for his repressions in the
unrestrained, whimsically violent visions of his Alice books” (qtd. in Brooker 95). From the math
games spotted by those in the know about Carroll’s career as a mathematician to the rumors of
pedophilia to the post-1960s connection frequently made between Alice and LSD or, as a more
Victorian alternative, opium, following Jefferson Airplane’s “drug anthem” (Brooker 81) “White
Rabbit”, any variety of aspects from Carroll’s biography have become leading methods of
explaining the books. Whether or not any of these things were actually a part of Carroll’s life has
become less and less relevant
17
. Instead, Carroll’s life is rewritten to create the book the writer
wants Alice to be, and to furnish their reading of Alice with an understandable logic. In doing so,
they speak directly to the question of genre Alice evokes: it is not a fairy tale in so much as it was
written by one man and published for his profit as a novel – it belonged solely to him for a
number of years before entering the public domain. Thus it did not enter into being as communal
property, and yet it is understood as such in a way, and in order to make this contradiction easier
to parse, Carroll too is public property.
Perhaps this slow weaning of the interpretation from objective reality confirms Barthes’
projected future of literary criticism. To Barthes, “the reader is the space on which all the
quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies
not in its origin but in its destination” (Barthes 148). To some extent, then, the sum of parts a
reader has received in reference to Alice is an individual experience dictated only by their own
reactions; to some extent, Alice is lifted free of the reality of Carroll’s life and placed in the
reader’s fictional imagination of the same. In this estimation, it does not matter whether Alice
was intended to be a fairy tale or an entirely new type of writing, or that large parts of the text do
17
As far as all the sources I have consulted are concerned, there was absolutely no connection
between Carroll and drug use.
38
not necessarily fit that definition – it only matters that Alice is understood as such in the readers’
minds and thus adapted to reflect a more fairy-tale-like aesthetic.
Understanding Alice as a text which has come to function as fairy tale within popular
culture, though not necessarily by intention, “some new type of fairy-lore” being interpretable as
an intention for diversion from the genre, explains many facets of the current understanding of
the text. Both the fixation on the “golden afternoon” of its origins and on Alice as a spontaneous
oral product fit within the notion of how fairy tales are created and conveyed. Understanding
Alice as a fairy tale also gives it more of an archetypal quality, more of the weight fairy tales
hold as national urtexts, explaining at least in part how Alice could come to hold such a
signifying power of modern understanding of the Victorian period. This could also be one of the
contributing factors to the transition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the
Looking-Glass to being known as Alice in Wonderland, eliminating Through the Looking-Glass
from the title the works are known by. The melding associates them centrally with the first book,
and by extension, with the origin of the first book. Alice becomes real in Alice Liddell and at the
same time elevated to a timelessly folkloric status; even more, the act of telling the Alice story as
opposed to reading it becomes the right way to tell it, becomes almost traditional. Individuality
in interpretation and style of presenting the material is part of its essence. With the rise of new
forms of media, interpretation of Alice in film and alternative media became possible.
Illustration of Alice formed such a central part of the text, and was the most accessible part to
child readers, that for readers the images were equal to the text in terms of generating nostalgic
value.
39
3. “What is the Use of a Book Without Pictures?”
18
3.1 Knowing by Seeing: Illustration as an Epistemological Tool
“What is the use of a book without pictures?” (Carroll 11) Alice asks, while watching her
sister read, before she falls asleep and before she enters Wonderland. The answer, to her,
apparently is none, and it is lucky that the book Alice herself is in has pictures aplenty. When
thinking about Alice as a character, perhaps the first image that comes to mind is a little girl,
sometimes blond, sometimes brunette, sometimes in a blue dress, and sometimes not. For some,
she appears as an illustration from the books and for others as a character in a film. The
association between Alice and image is very strong, and very easily called to mind, but it also
diverse and has existed in many ways. Peter Pan, which was not originally illustrated, has by
contrast appeared fairly uniformly on stage and on the screen over the years. Alice’s image, and
the images of other characters appearing in the books, have appeared so frequently over the
years, and in so many guises, that the only point of agreement appears to be that they must
appear as images.
In the previous chapters, I have discussed how the context in which Alice was created
affected the text as well as how current views of that time have affected interpretations and
adaptations of Alice, and how the act of retelling it purports to be more authentic to its origins
than rereading it. This lays the groundwork for written retellings, but in fact the majority of
retellings that are currently well-remembered are films. This is by no means surprising – as
already mentioned, Alice was one of the earliest children’s books to have a strong interplay
between image and text. Carroll himself was an avid photographer (he was moderately well-
known for his photography at the time, as the technology was very new and not many had the
18
Alice expressing dissatisfaction with her sister’s book (Carroll 11)
40
means or the skills). He illustrated Alice’s Adventures Underground, the edition he gave directly
to Alice Liddell. When Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was published by Macmillan three
years later, they hired John Tenniel as a professional illustrator. Carroll worked closely with
Tenniel and didn’t allow him to veer far from the designs in Alice’s Adventures Underground.
The images provided by both Carroll and Tenniel have allowed Alice to wander far from the
confines of a book. After Tenniel’s illustration, the most influential image of Alice appears in
Disney’s 1951 film Alice in Wonderland. The conjunction of Tenniel’s images, the lasting
controversies sparked by Carroll’s photography, and Disney’s film form striking impressions of
Alice as image that have lasted until today and informed all later adaptations. In fact, these three
sources form three major points of origin for Alice’s representation in image, and depending on
which impression is the strongest with the adapter, guide the way Alice is understood.
The interplay between text and image in Alice is far more intricate than in most Victorian
works. While the picture book as a form of narrative for children was not entirely unheard of in
1865, when Alice was published, it was at its beginnings and significantly more rare than it is
today. In the original edition given to Alice Liddell, Carroll illustrated the book himself; after
signing a contract with MacMillan, John Tenniel, an already famous artist for newspapers and
political satire at the time, was recommended to Carroll (cf. Cohen 127). Tenniel and Carroll
appear to have clashed on a number of matters (cf. Cohen 129), though not severely enough to
halt the production of the book. Carroll’s standards for the illustration were very specific, largely
following his original illustrations in the book he gave Alice Liddell. Tenniel, as an established
artist, did not take some of Carroll’s suggestions, such as that he use a model for his illustrations
of Alice (cf. Gardner 11). Nonetheless, both author and illustrator appear to have been satisfied
41
with the final product, and either way, the illustrations have had at least as much of an influence
on how Alice is remembered as the text has.
According to Mou-Lan Wong’s essay “Generations of Re-Generation”, this interplay of
text and visual forms a part of Alice’s lasting appeal. In her discussion of the text, the role of
image within it is that it “plays on what Alice “sees” and what she “reads”” (Wong 142).
Tenniel’s illustrations, then, become a method of immersion into the world of the text,
corresponding closely with it. This is even more pronounced in Through the Looking Glass,
where “the whole of chapter 11 comprises a title and one fragment of a sentence that
accompanies the illustration it faces. Here the text is reduced to the status of caption, a subtext,
and Tenniel’s drawings are “elevated to primary status” (Wong 148). Wong is referring to the
chapter in which Alice awakes from her dream about the Looking-Glass world and realizes she is
not shaking the Red Queen between her hands but instead a black kitten. This information is split
between two chapters, both shorter than a page. At the end of chapter nine, Alice threatens the
red queen, “I’ll shake you into a kitten” (Carroll 280), and she does so in chapter ten, entitled
“shaking” (Carroll 281)
19
. This is followed immediately by chapter eleven, “waking” (Carroll
282), in which the only sentence is “it really was a kitten after all” (Carroll 282)
20
. Both chapters
feature illustrations of Alice’s hands holding first the red queen and then the kitten she turns out
to be when Alice wakes up. Splitting the moment of waking between two chapters and using the
same image with different subjects recreates both the disorientation of waking from a dream by
separating the visual moment of realization from the textual one, as well as indicating that both
text and images are valid sources of understanding; nowhere in the actual text is it clearly stated
in these chapters that Alice is waking up from a dream, except in the chapter titles. Focusing on
19
See Appendix A, fig. 5
20
See Appendix A, fig. 6
42
the intense interplay between text and image in Alice and showing that image occasionally
overshadows text as a way of knowing what is happening in the story shows that to some degree,
Alice has always been a visual medium. This allows for an easier understanding of Alice as film
material for later interpreters.
Alice waking up from her dream is only revealed in full at the beginning of chapter
twelve, but it can be guessed by the illustration and headings, possibly the only two features a
child reader who cannot yet read would really perceive without adult help. Additionally, the
image provided shows only Alice’s hands holding the kitten, framing the page, thereby
positioning the reader’s hands in the same place as Alice’s. According to Wong, this not only
“foregrounds the cooperation of the reader’s body and the physical artifact of the book” (Wong
149), but is also a form of tribute to the artist’s hands, in this case both Tenniel and Carroll. The
reader is placed in the position of both Alice and Alice’s creators, meaning that in some way, the
creators become part of the fiction, and the fiction becomes part of the reader. Alice, Carroll and
Tenniel now exist both as presences in and manipulators of narrative and image, and the reader
accesses them both from the same point of view. Especially child readers who have only this
access to the narrative could easily form strong bonds with the visual that have little or no
relationship to the actual textual content.
Image can thus define characters in perception, and be one mode of explaining why
interpretation of a character may be divergent from textual description but still recognizably the
same character. The prime example for this is Alice herself. Within the two books Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, the figure of Alice is the most
frequently repeated one, and, in adaptation, often carries over many of her characteristics – the
dress with the wide skirt and apron, as well as the length and shape of her hair and headband.
43
Auerbach argues that “the demure propriety” (Auerbach 35) of Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice
have “led readers to see her role in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as more passive than it is”
(Auerbach 35). By contrast, the photograph of Alice Liddell Carroll appended to Alice’s
Adventures under Ground was “strikingly sensuous and otherworldly” (Auerbach 34), and
Carroll’s original illustrations “reproduce her eeriness perfectly” (Auerbach 34). This effect is
produced by the changeable colors of her hair, at times blonde and at times brunette, though
never straight and with bangs as Alice Liddell’s was. Auerbach, unlike most scholars, does not
attribute this to Carroll’s lack of artistic skill, but rather to a desire to portray Alice herself as
equally changeable, eerie and mildly threatening as her surroundings in Wonderland. Tenniel,
meanwhile, was criticized by Carroll as being the “only artist, who has drawn for me, who has
resolutely refused to use a model” (qtd. in Gardner 11) which led to a number of pictures in Alice
being “entirely out of proportion – head decidedly too large and feet decidedly too small” (qtd. in
Gardner 11). Auerbach calls Tenniel’s drawings of Alice “clean” and “no-nonsense” (Auerbach
35), eliminating in the illustrations the kinship between Alice and Wonderland. This in turn
affects the way Alice is read in the text, becoming more no-nonsense herself and hiding her role,
in Auerbach’s argument at least, as the creator of Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world.
Tenniel’s original illustrations were without color and the only colored ones he provided
were for the Nursery Alice, released some years later. In these, her dress is yellow or orange, but
this color scheme is seen fairly seldom in adaptation. One of the few better-known adaptations to
keep this coloring nowadays is Nick Willing’s 1999 Alice in Wonderland. Instead, most
frequently, Alice is portrayed in a blue dress. The blue dress is commonly believed to have
originated in Walt Disney’s 1951 film Alice in Wonderland. In fact, the blue dress has been an
iconic feature in illustrations of the book in color since 1893, in an American edition published
44
by Thomas Crowell, and has since then appeared in many new editions of the books that chose to
use different illustrations or color Tenniel’s. In the Disney version, while the general outline of
the characters and images are similar, these are heavily simplified and transformed to fit
Disney’s more comedic, cartoonish style; as such, the level of detail on Alice’s dress is
exchanged for a simple blue dress with a white apron in roughly the same shape as Tenniel drew
them, and the girl herself appears to be a cross between Tenniel’s Alice and Kathryn Beaumont,
the voice actress and model on which the illustrations of Alice were based. It is this blue dress
(be it Disney’s or those predating Disney’s) which became the iconic image of Alice, repeated in
most movie adaptations – especially ones affiliated with Disney, which quite a few of the
currently more well-known ones are, e.g. Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland, or the TV
series Once Upon a Time in Wonderland. Even American McGee’s 2000 computer game
21
shows Alice in a blue dress, albeit as a young adult and with some modifications to the costume.
Alice’s appearance over the years remains true to these original themes, though the shape of
characters surrounding her and the understanding of her story differ wildly – in fact, the closest
tie maintained to the urtext is Alice’s figure clad in Alice’s dress. The maintenance of image is
registered as a way to maintain content as well.
Another key character whose illustration by Tenniel has become synonymous with his
portrayal in adaptation is the Mad Hatter
22
. This is a particularly interesting case, as the Mad
Hatter often receives expansion as a character in adaptations, appearing more frequently and with
greater relevance to the plot than he does in the book (arguably because adaptations, unlike the
21
See Appendix C2, a computer game in which Alice has gone insane and must fight a variety of
Wonderland characters to regain sanity.
22
Carroll is not responsible for the turn of phrase “mad as a hatter” – the phrase was a common
one in Britain prior to the Alice books and Carroll was presumably using a literal image of the
somewhat baffling colloquialism (cf. Ryan)
45
original books, actually have plots). The Mad Hatter in particular stands out, however – Tenniel
illustrated him six times, five times in Wonderland and once in Through the Looking-Glass,
where the illustration remains the same but the character is referred to as “Hatta” or “the King’s
Messenger” (Carroll 206). He is the only character to receive this semblance of continuity
between books, excluding Alice and Dinah, her cat. This makes the illustration of the Hatter the
primary reason to believe the Looking-Glass world and Wonderland are the same place, which is
stated nowhere in the text, though the two books are often conflated in adaptation. Again,
illustration is thereby promoted to being a valid epistemological tool for the world of the text.
The Hatter has a diminutive stature and caricature-like proportions. While he is roughly
the same height as Alice, who is seven, his head is enormous. It, as well as his large, for-sale hat
have been adapted faithfully with great regularity. Particularly these comedic large features lend
themselves well to Disney’s animation style. While some live-action versions, especially Alice
(2009) and Once Upon A Time In Wonderland feature the Mad Hatter not only as a real person
but as a love interest, the hat and slight shabbiness of his clothing are maintained, indicating a
working-class character. Again, the text does not state he is working class, or that his clothes are
in any way in disrepair, but he is consistently adapted as such, the image once again overriding
the text.
Perhaps even more important than the maintenance of character image over textual
content is the role played by the scenery in adaptation. Tenniel’s illustration focused mostly on
characters, leaving the scenery of Wonderland as the only real new ground to be covered. The
Caterpillar’s mushroom perch
23
is one of the few constants, being one of Tenniel’ illustrations,
otherwise the depiction of Wonderland varies somewhat depending on producer. In Walt
23
Appendix A fig. 7-22
46
Disney’s 1951 movie, it was clear the animation was the main draw, “the sequence directors had
started trying to outdo one another” (Gabler 487) to the point where most of the executives
involved believed the movie’s story suffered for it. To some extent the scenery of Alice in
Wonderland (1951) is far more the star of the movie than Alice herself, as the sections between
different sequences have no need to follow any specific logic and are in fact intended to be
whimsical. In most adaptations since Disney, this has remained an important feature, especially
in the wake of computer-generated images (CGI) and the potential to create this level of visual
invention with a real-life cast. The only stand-out from this trend was 1999’s Alice in
Wonderland, where Nick Willing chose instead to portray Wonderland in a more pastoral,
Victorian England type of tame, garden landscape. If the maintenance of Tenniel’s images (or at
least Disney’s interpretation of Tenniel’s images) proves the influence of the original on
adaptations, scenery is where adaptations show their own character.
This is not to say that film adaptations using Tenniel’s illustrations as a main inspiration
ignore Carroll’s writing; many passages are maintained verbatim in film dialogue and many
quotes from the books have become just as iconic as the images. Tenniel’s illustrations have
become a significant epistemological tool for analyzing the text, providing information on the
Hatter’s socioeconomic status and presence in both Wonderland and the Looking-Glass World,
as well as a guiding image of Alice’s appearance which has in many ways shaped her perceived
character. Furthermore, Carroll was just as involved in the production of the images as he was of
the text, making them at least indirectly subject to his authorship. In fact, visual media could
very well have been what Carroll would have wanted to produce himself, had he had access to
our current tools of storytelling – he was, after all, an avid and decently well-known
photographer in his own time.
47
3.2 Reimagining the Author Through His Images
Of the controversies surrounding Carroll, the greatest concerns his affinity for
photography, specifically photography of nude children. This interest emerged out of a
combination of his longstanding enjoyment of photography and his close relationships with a
number of children, whom he called his “child-friends”. After Alice’s Adventure’s in
Wonderland made Carroll a minor celebrity
24
, his new role as a children’s author meant an influx
in child-friends. Around 1871, he began documenting interactions with his child-friends in his
diaries, along with their birthdays, likes and dislikes in order to write them letters and think of
games suiting their interests (cf. Cohen 175). As for photographing them, he was careful to
secure the mother’s approval before taking any pictures, as well as “diligently destroy[ing]
failures” (Cohen 165). Around his 50
th
birthday, records of photographing sessions cease to
appear in Carroll’s diaries, and before his death, “he destroyed most of the negatives and prints
of his nude studies” (Cohen 165). Only six known copies of nude prints Carroll created survive,
four of girls and two rarely mentioned ones of boys, and there is no evidence that he ever took
any of the Liddell sisters. This facet of his personality was not particularly known at the time of
the publication of the Alice books. Cohen speculates that one of his reasons for halting his
photographic efforts in the 1880s was that rumors about his photography were beginning to
spread.
When Karoline Leach mentions the “great chasm of cultural incomprehension” (qtd. in
Brooker 37) between present scholarship and the Victorian era, she is speaking of the difference
between a modern-day response to Carroll’s photographic pursuits and a Victorian one. It is nigh
24
Carroll was decently well-known as an academic and made a few contributions to the field of
mathematics, as well as being a hobby photographer, but it was Alice that gave him national
recognition.
48
impossible to convincingly argue whether Carroll’s interest in children was innocent or not;
certainly it would not be seen as such by modern standards. What Victorian commentators would
have to say about it remains unknown, however, as Carroll’s photography was not widely
disseminated and he kept it very private. Leach, who argues that Carroll’s romantic interests
were in adult women and his fascination with childhood was innocent within the context of the
times, claims that the elapsed time prevents understanding of Carroll’s interests in a manner
appropriate for their intention at the time. However, even the earliest biographies of Carroll,
written at the beginning of the 20
th
century, portray him as “emotionally restrained, “innocent” in
his lack of sexual activity, but obsessed with female children” (Brooker 1). In 1945, Florence
Becker Lennon wrote the first biography suggesting “that Carroll could have been in love with
Alice Liddell” (Brooker 2) and in fact have proposed to her when she was eleven years old, and
since then, this idea haunts Carroll’s biography.
Brooker describes the original idea of Carroll being in love with Alice Liddell as “tacked-
on, speculative, without recourse to new evidence” (Brooker 3), saying that “it allowed Carroll to
retain the Victorian chastity that was part of his nostalgic charm, yet incorporated the
psychoanalytic complexity that the twentieth century demanded” (Brooker 3). That is to say,
especially these early interpretations maintained Carroll’s physical innocence, denying that he
could have acted on any desires he had towards children or others. However, they also provide a
depth to the innocence they portray, making it complex and threatening. Since it has already
been established that Carroll, by the process of fictionalization of Alice’s origin story, becomes
something of a fictional character himself, this twofaced innocence is transferred onto the text of
Alice as well, influencing speculation about Carroll’s life and informing speculation about Alice.
49
This speculation was already well established when Morton Cohen, one of today’s
leading Carroll biographers, began work on the diaries. These had been in storage for many
years, so Cohen was the first to discover “six razored pages” (Brooker 5), i.e. six pages that had
been carefully cut out of the diaries. According to Cohen, “something occurred during those
three days that caused a break in the relationship [with the Liddells], something that exiled
Charles [Carroll] and cut him off from the children” (Cohen 100), and whatever it was that
happened had to have been scandalous enough for Carroll himself or one of his relatives to cut it
from the diaries. Cohen’s theory is that Carroll suggested a future marriage between himself and
Alice Liddell during these three days missing from the diaries, and that the Liddells turned him
down and broke off contact, fearing the connection between the children and Carroll was now
inappropriate both in terms of the age difference and in terms of Carroll’s relative lack of wealth
and influence. Alice Liddell would have been eleven years old at the time. Of course, Cohen
assumes that “Charles [Carroll] and his contemporaries did not, in fact, understand human
sexuality, and what they thought about it they concealed and ignored” (Cohen 220), an opinion
which maintains the image of Victorian-era repression and innocence but is by no means
accurate. In Kincaid’s words, “it is time we stopped imagining that the subject of sex tied the
tongues of all Victorians” (Kincaid 134).
Biographer Karoline Leach’s counter-argument, as portrayed by Brooker in his
introductory chapter on the developments in Carroll biographies, appears at first to be less far-
fetched: that it is more likely the missing diary pages refer to a relationship with an adult woman,
most likely Mrs. Liddell or the children’s nanny, and were cut from the books by a relative
wishing to hide this, by Victorian standards, scandalous tidbit after Carroll’s death. As for the
nude pictures, which to Cohen are further evidence of Carroll’s sexual interests lying in young
50
children, Brooker mediating Leach says, “if Carroll was a pervert […] then so was the rest of his
surrounding culture” (Brooker 37). This is perhaps a bold claim about the interests of Victorians
– acknowledging even the vast difference in understanding of childhood and the lack of any
stated concept of pedophilia being widely known and feared at the time, neither nude
photographs of children nor as many close relationships with children as Carroll enjoyed were
common or normal. Then again, it is not any more or less bold than to claim all Victorians were
repressed prudes. Leach substantiates her argument with the claim that she found one of the
missing diary pages, from which she draws the conclusion that Carroll was accused of courting
the Liddell’s governess, but she goes on to say it is far more likely he was having an affair with
Mrs. Liddell.
25
In Brooker’s analysis of the cumulative work on Carroll’s life, he states that this
is “inevitably just as speculative as Cohen’s theory” (Brooker 24). In essence, “Leach’s key and
most contentious argument is that Carroll had perfectly conventional sexual desires for adult
women” (Leach 37), but this is no easier or more difficult to prove than the opposite.
Brooker’s statements on 20
th
century fascination with the potential of a dark secret
embedded in Alice’s creation form his explanation of the pedophilia rumor’s popularity, and he
is by no means the only one to believe in this fascination. Valerie Walkerdine’s “Popular Culture
and the Eroticization of Little Girls” discusses the tendency of 20
th
century popular culture to
take the child as gender-neutral when “actually he is always figured as a boy (Walkerdine 256).
Girls, on the other hand, are “everything that the child is not supposed to be” (Walkerdine 256).
If Kincaid claims a well-behaved child is unloveable (cf. Kincaid 95), then Walkerdine tells us
25
She bases this on the note that he is supposedly paying court to the governess and to Ina – Ina
being the nickname both for Lorina, the eldest Liddell daughter, and Lorina, the Liddell mother.
To further her argument she notes the frequency of Mrs. Liddell’s accompanying their outings
and the friendship Carroll enjoyed with her even after the break from the Liddell family (cf.
Brooker 24).
51
that girls are either unloveable or unchildlike, and she veers toward the latter. According to her
understanding of the way female children are viewed nowadays. They are “to be protected yet to
be constantly alluring” (Walkerdine 257), a hefty burden to place on girls. Walkerdine describes
the entire concept as being “about massive fantasies carried in the culture” (Walkerdine 258),
which place girls in this odd position of being both objects of desire, but not cognizant of this
fact in order to maintain their status as innocents.
Thus, Carroll’s interest in children has remained a point of hot contention. What is certain
is that he had a number of child friends, and that he invested a great deal of time and effort into
maintaining his relationships with them. This is evident from his diaries, as is his friendship with
the Liddells. Some of his photography has also been preserved, including a few shots of the
Liddell sisters. There is no substantial proof, however, that his relationship with them was
anything beyond friendly, nor is there any proof that the nude photography indicates further
misbehavior of any sort. His diaries also reveal intense religious fervor; he was, after all, a
Reverend. This has been taken as further evidence of some “dark secret”, that his occasional
bouts of religious writing were a form of atonement for his “rigidly held in check” (Cohen 43)
desires. Ultimately by now the ability to answer the question of who among these women and
children, if any, Carroll was actually interested in has become unanswerable barring a major
discovery of new primary sources. Carroll’s documents, his diaries, letters and effects, have been
combed through at such great length and breadth that most new analyses thereof rehash the same
question which none of the data can answer satisfactorily. Then again, the debate has in many
ways become a self-nourishing cycle; the question of whether or not Carroll was a pedophile,
despite the inability to provide a conclusive answer, is far more interesting to a world fascinated
with “images of the erotic child” (Kincaid 275), of which Alice has become a leading figure.
52
Carroll’s interest in image in the form of photography has, for better or for worse, become
instrumental in shaping his own image and that of his works. This is true not only in the
figurative sense of the word “image”, but also in the literal, in that those who believe the “Carroll
myth” (i.e. the pedophilia rumor) use it as grounds for creating darker, more adult images of
Alice, while those who refute it seek out images “authentic” to the original work. If the presence
of the folktale connection inspires adaptation, then the “Carroll myth” also significantly shapes
the responses of different interpretive communities.
3.3 The Film Industry, the 20
th
Century Child, and Alice
The beginnings of the Carroll myth did not appear in a historical void. Carolyn Sigler, in
the introduction to her anthology of Carroll-related literary work, argues that “the Alice books’
appropriation as high literary culture in the early 1930s marked a significant decline in their
appropriation and interpretation by popular authors” (Sigler xvi). She situates this in the growing
tendency towards Freudian analyses in the 1930s, often to do with repression, making the Alice
books “too complex for children” (Sigler xvi), i.e. the inception of the Carroll myth. Incidentally,
Alice Hargreaves née Liddell passed away in 1934, removing the last living link to the books’
origins, and according to Brooker, the first descriptions of Carroll as “a paedophile, his books
[as] dark allegories, and Alice [as] his obsession” (Brooker xv) occurred in 1945. Both Brooker
and Sigler show that literary adaptations did indeed continue, however, Sigler notes that post-
1930 adaptations are “directed at a sophisticated adult audience” (Sigler xvi) and largely
“unrelated to the books themselves” (Sigler xvi). Whether or not this is entirely accurate is a
different question. Sigler does point out the same drive within Alice’s audiences towards
inscribing adult themes onto the text and using these in adaptation, Brooker notes in his
discussion on how the pedophilia myth gained footing. Additionally, her cut-off date for the
53
point at which she claims adaptive work no longer reacts to the same social circumstances
Carroll was writing in and becomes more associated with “high art” roughly coincides with the
date at which film versions became more and more popular, with three versions being released in
the 1930s alone. Thus, the rise of the film industry and with it, an ever-increasing number of
Alice adaptations in film, occurred almost simultaneously with the rise of the Carroll myth and
the belief in a deeper relationship between author and addressee. This is unlikely to have been
coincidental, especially because quite a few adaptations include an opening scene of the “golden
afternoon”, featuring a portrayal of Carroll himself within the film.
Aligning the beginnings of cinema history with the literary transition of Alice from an
icon of popular culture to a high art object is a tricky undertaking. Thomas Elsaesser argues that
“cinema has no origins”(Elsaesser 18), because the technology for the production of cinema
predated the actual institution of cinema as a popular pastime by nearly fifty years. In fact,
Victorian society, hungering for “instantaneity, for simultaneity, and interactivity” (Elsaesser 21)
even rejected early cinema prototypes because they were not as advanced as the imaginations
thereof. Additionally, media convergence means that what has occurred is nothing as simple as a
substitution of one medium with another; rather both literature and film persist and carve out
individual, but overlapping spaces for themselves. Thus, the first few movie adaptations of Alice,
released in 1903, 1910 and 1915
26
, do overlap with Sigler’s timeframe. However, these were all
silent adaptations; perhaps the true shift from literature to film as the primary medium for
popular consumption, such as it was, occurred in 1927, with the Warner Brother’s release of The
Jazz Singer, the first feature-length talkie.
26
Appendix B Fig. 1
54
While Sigler critiques the move away from literary children’s media in the 1930s, the
original golden age of the Disney corporation
27
begins exactly where Sigler leaves off. The
Disney corporation begins with Alice: the first product released by the studio was The Alice
Comedies (1923), a series of comedic shorts featuring “a little girl named Alice, like Alice in
Wonderland, who entered a cartoon world and interacted with cartoon characters”(Gabler 70).
Over the course of the late twenties and early thirties, the corporation released a series of
animated short features, including the iconic beginnings of Mickey Mouse. The first feature film,
Snow White, was released in 1937, to incredible success, which was the beginning of Disney’s
global commercial status. In the following years, Disney released a number of other feature
films, all musical, all animated. As with most companies, Disney experienced a dip in profits
during World War II, and reverted largely to short features for a brief period of time. The early
postwar years saw a return to feature-length animated films, including Cinderella (1950), Alice
in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953). This situates Alice in Wonderland firmly within the
popular trend of family-friendly musical movies, which lasted though the 1960s. While the
poetry within Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is frequently translated into musical form in
film, it is possible, even likely, that musical movies being popular at the time the influential
Disney movie was released are responsible for this trend.
27
Depending on who is asked, the Disney company can be said to have multiple golden eras – in
the mid to late thirties, at the company’s beginning when their initial run of short films
culminating in the feature film Snow White. The second “golden era” refers to the postwar period
in which Alice was released, along with several other classics such as The Jungle Book, Dumbo,
Cinderella etc. The third “golden era” is also called the Disney renaissance, taking place in the
90s and featuring a resurgence of the animated musical based on a fairy tale. Which age was
truly “golden” seems to depend on the viewer, with “golden” meaning something along the lines
of “most nostalgic to me personally” – similar, maybe, to the meaning of “golden” in Carroll’s
“golden afternoon”.
55
These years, also noted for the surge in popularity for traditional gender roles and the
American Dream, witnessed what amounted to a return to the idolization of the family structure
of the 1860s and the era when Alice’s Adventures was written. As such, they were fertile ground
for movies idolizing childhood, family and naïveté. In fact, the tendency in Neal Gabler’s
autobiography of Walt Disney is to create such a story out of Disney’s own life, emphasizing
Disney’s desire to “escape” (Gabler 42) his immigrant background and poverty through
following his artistic passions. In creating this narrative, Gabler makes the successes of his films
part of the success of America as a nation. Disney’s early films also existed in an era in which
going to the cinema and broadcast television were still relatively new and exciting, and the
relationship to them was largely characterized by what Henry Jenkins called “passive media
spectatorship” (Jenkins 3) – i.e., unlike today, media producers’ main connection to their
audience was through critical reviews, viewing figures and the amount of money a movie made.
Nowadays, this is significantly different, with the internet and fan forums providing a ready
source for producers to scope the demand and create an adequate supply. By this reckoning,
Alice entered into a cinematic world in which the content and the producer thereof were
attempting to reflect the family ideals of the time without having much actual input from its
audience to define the direction this took.
Nicholas Sammond’s Babes in Tomorrowland analyzes the beginnings of Disney’s work
in a more functional manner. Where Gabler, at least to some extent, embraces the notion of Walt
Disney, the nation’s paternal mogul, Sammond describes Disney as embodying Foucault’s
“author function” (cf. Sammond 364) in which his authority is determined by “a complex
discursive matrix” (Sammond 364) formed by production, response, success and form of his
products. Furthermore, Sammond makes a point of showing that both the figure of Disney and
56
the figure of the child for whom he was making movies are discursively created. This does not
mean he is criticizing Disney or Disney’s modes of production; it means he is interested in
Disney largely in the role his corporation played both as a founding factor for the understanding
of childhood in the 20
th
century and as a media producer responding to what he saw as the nature
of the demand for childhood-related subjects. The notion of a creator being created by his
audience relates Disney to Carroll in a fundamental way: the telling of his story always mirrors
the telling of himself.
In order to facilitate this analysis, Sammond tracks the notion of childhood from the early
20
th
century manuals of child-rearing, in which the child had a developmental schedule on which
it must be kept and it was the responsibility of its parents (especially mothers) to ensure it did so.
Throughout the 20
th
century, these manuals became more focused on individuality, culminating
in teaching parents to adapt their parenting techniques to their own child rather than keeping
their child on track of the development of a single universal Child. Many of these textbooks also
mentioned a need for “regulation of media consumption” (Sammond 111), however offered little
advice of how exactly media was to be regulated. While it is the case that since the dawn of
cinema, adults feared inappropriate materials, this became especially a factor in the 30s and 40s,
when film became more available, profitable and wide-spread than it had been previously. In
1930, the Motion Picture Production Code (also known as the Hays code) was adopted for the
purpose of restricting risqué content in films in order to protect children. What Sammond argues
about child-rearing mentality of 20
th
century America makes a significant contrast to that of 19
th
century Britain. Where Frost portrays a nation focused on the role of the family and parenting,
and Wullschläger and Cohen point towards a literary and artistic culture almost obsessed with
purity and innocence, 20
th
century America appears more interested in the child as an
57
investment. To Sammond, “they are simultaneously the creatures of their parents and of the state,
but not yet individuals unto themselves” (Sammond 4), meaning that children are a reflection of
the parents raising them but simultaneously form the nation’s future. The child becomes
“embodied potential” (Sammond 4), having both no and potentially all identities represented by
the nation as a whole. This coalition of interests supersedes the child itself as a person; a notion
which parenting trends attempted to rectify by intense focus on the individual. This places the
child portrayed in Alice in a different position in 1951 than in 1856. Her individuality becomes
key, because it is what distinguishes the real child from the nation’s imagined child. To Carroll’s
time, her mimicry of social forms in an attempt (and failure) is what makes her a child; her
process of learning is childlike. To Disney’s time, in order to be childlike, she would have to test
boundaries and break rules.
3.4 A Very Unhappy Unbirthday
28
– Alice’s Second Origin
Though Disney clearly had a personal connection to the project, having chosen the Alice
Comedies as the first product for the Disney company to market, and though Alice in
Wonderland is remembered fondly by many people today, at the time, the movie was regarded as
something of a failure. It performed poorly at the box office and did not garner much critical
support; it was rereleased on television a number of times, but was only released for home
viewing many years later. The concept for the movie had been around already five years prior to
the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves; Roy Disney, Walt’s brother and business
partner, had inquired about the rights to Alice “as early as June 1932” (Gabler 215), and had
learned that Carroll’s book was in the public domain. The actual adaptation was released twenty
28
During the Mad Tea Party, the Mad Hatter wishes Alice a happy unbirthday; this becomes a
musical number in the Disney version entitled “A Very Happy Unbirthday”
58
years later. It was Disney’s eleventh purely animated feature film
29
, and eighteenth feature film
in total (cf. Gabler 635). It followed on the heels of a series of a series of mildly disappointing
films. Disney had high hopes for Alice, saying in an interview that Alice would be the company’s
first “real post-war production” (qtd, in Gabler 477). However, Disney would not be satisfied
with this film either.
In 1947, he had “hired English writer Alduous Huxley to do a screenplay” (Gabler 459);
in meetings, Disney proceeded to dominate the discussion so thoroughly that Huxley “couldn’t
get in a word” (Gabler 486) and subsequently quit. Bob Carr, an early head of the story
department, lamented that “there is no story in the book” (qtd. in Gabler 486). Moreover, he had
concerns about Alice as a lead character. “She plays a straight man to a cast of screw-ball
comics” (qtd. in Gabler 486), an “untenable position” (qtd. in Gabler 486) for a main character. It
wasn’t the animation that was in question, it was the lack of cohesive storyline and the role Alice
as a character took which made for a problematic project. Disney shared these concerns, but had
been urged many times over the years to complete the project by what Ben Sharpsteen, one of
Disney’s directors and producers, called “especially sophisticated people” (qtd. in Gabler 486)
who were influential in the Hollywood scene. This interest was largely artistic and not
necessarily commercially feasible. This mirrors Sigler’s statements that Alice became an object
of high art in the 1930s; film adaptations were sought after at this period in time. Disney changed
his mind several times regarding the lead actress and much of the content, admitting that “he
would have bumped it for Peter Pan had that film been ready” (Gabler 487), but ultimately the
studio was forced to release the film. Following the film’s release, Disney said both that he had
been “trapped into making ‘Alice in Wonderland’ against [his] better judgment” (qtd. in Gabler
29
Gabler differentiates between animated films, live-action films and combinations of the two
59
487) and that “it’s terribly tough to transfer whimsy to the screen” (qtd. in Gabler 487). This
indicates both that he was dissatisfied with the product as an artist and a producer, but also that
the creators of the film found their problem to be in the source material. The fantastical,
whimsical nature of the text was ideal for animation, but the Victorian manners presented by
Alice herself and the episodic format were not fit for the 1950s style of moviemaking. The child
created by Carroll is no longer the child as the world of 1951 sees it, and thus cannot carry the
entire movie by herself. The result is too well-behaved to be interesting to Disney’s audience,
and too fanciful to be acceptable to Carroll’s audience.
Alice, which was not as popular as Snow White or Cinderella upon release, but unlike
these, benefitted from the drug culture of the 1960s, enjoyed renewed popularity in the latter
quarter of the century
30
. The wealth of re-releases and re-formatting especially in the 1990s and
2000s after a dip in the production of animated movies throughout the latter half of the 20
th
century led to the movie’s current popularity among the younger generation as a staple Disney
classic despite its rocky beginnings. It also has significant fan following among adults, possibly
precisely because Alice has become a text for adults within the context of the rumors about
Carroll. The nostalgic value the film has becomes retroactive in this sense, as knowledge about
30
One of Disney’s most important marketing strategies is to re-release films not in terms of
demand, but in a limited amount after a given number of years to drive up scarcity. Thus, Alice
first appeared on VHS in 1981. Subsequently, every four or five years a new edition would be
released, including the “Masterpiece edition” in 2004, which featured a variety of previously
unseen production material. In 2010, to accompany the Tim Burton film, also a product of the
Disney corporation, an “Un-Anniversary” edition was released. In 2011, only a year later, a 60
th
anniversary Blu-ray edition was released. Products the corporation is not as proud of as Alice do
not enjoy such frequent re-releases. “Der Fuehrer’s Face”, now somewhat controversial, has only
been re-released twice since 1943, both in the context of longer documentary features on the
Disney corporation’s history. Song of the South, the extremely controversial half-animated, half-
live-action vehicle for Uncle Remus stories that the company has since then regarded as possibly
its greatest failure, remains locked in “the Disney Vault” and is not likely to be re-released,
though Splash Mountain, the ride in Disneyland based on Song of the South, remains popular.
60
the book and its author increase with age, allowing the film to become more nuanced when
watched again as an adult.
This is not to say that children cannot enjoy Disney’s Alice. Where Michael Hancher had
argued that the original text of Alice might be too difficult for a child to handle alone,
necessitating an adult reader-aloud, Disney’s version is explicitly intended for a family audience.
Disney’s adaptation eliminates many of the more conceptually tricky aspects from both books
while picking out scenes and moments from both books to adapt into Alice in Wonderland
regardless of their original placement. For instance, the chess game set-up from Through the
Looking Glass is gone, isolating several of the more iconic figures from the Looking-Glass world
and placing them in Wonderland instead. Additionally, much of Alice’s loss of agency and
confusion, especially towards the beginning of the story, is displaced and only hinted at towards
the denouement as a reason for Alice to leave Wonderland and return home. In fact, in the
opening musical number she expresses a strong desire for a world where everything is nonsense,
foreshadowing Wonderland.
Alice’s alarming shifts in size do occur as in the book, confusing her sense of identity,
but her concurrent loss of place in terms of her studies and her inability to correctly recite verse
is transmitted to other characters. Tweedledum and Tweedledee, taken from Through the
Looking Glass and placed in Wonderland between the Caucus Race and Frederick Rabbit’s
House, perform a musical rendition of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” and, as Alice is leaving,
begin the parodied version of “You Are Old, Father William”, which in the book Alice recited
incorrectly to the Caterpillar (cf. Carroll 52). When actually talking to the Caterpillar, he tells her
to recite, and she begins with “How Doth the Little Busy Bee” – the original version, which in
the book, Alice misremembers as “How Doth the Little Crocodile” (Carroll 23). In Disney’s
61
version, she remembers the correct poem and the Caterpillar impatiently stops her and recites the
“improved” “How Doth the Little Crocodile”. Alice is thereby far more in control of her faculties
than in the books. It is the world she is in which is confusing, not she herself. This rewrite also
speaks to the durability of Carroll’s nonsense. It is his poetry that becomes the “right” version,
lasting and iconic, not the original it was based on. This almost eradicates Wonderland’s ties to
the real world by not even allowing its characters to remember poems from there.
In fact, Alice as a character is treated far more kindly, or perhaps unrealistically by
Disney than by Carroll. Where in the books, she as often insulted the creatures of Wonderland as
they did her, became confused as to her identity, and had little to no idea of where she was going
or what she was doing, in the movies, her behavior is impeccable. With the exception of not
heeding her lessons at the beginning of the movie, she rarely causes offense; only once when
referencing her cat in front of the Dormouse, for which she immediately apologizes. In the book,
when she becomes too large to fit into Frederick Rabbit’s house, Bill the Lizard is sent down the
chimney to confront her; she kicks him back out, arguably one of the more brutal moments in the
books. Disney’s Alice sneezes involuntarily, expelling him from the house, for which she feels
guilty afterwards. Similarly softening the difficulties in her character, though she complains that
she “give[s herself] very good advice but [she] very seldom follow[s] it” (Disney) there is little
evidence of bad-temperedness Caterpillar accuses her of in the book (cf. Carroll 51). It is also
notable that Disney called her far too “cold” (Gabler 486) a character to carry a movie and yet
erased her more humanizing character traits, such as her misremembering poetry, her petulance
and her irritability. She becomes flawed by the flawlessness with which she is portrayed, while
Wonderland takes on her flaws and becomes less welcoming.
62
In order to create something of a plot where in the book there was none, Alice’s goal
throughout the first two thirds or so of the movie is to find the white rabbit she was following
when she fell down the rabbit-hole. Where the book rabbit vanishes fairly early on only to
reappear at the croquet game, and Alice loses interest in him, the film Alice continues to search
for him even after having been in his house. It is only after the Mad Tea Party, when she is lost
in the Tulgey Wood (a visual adaptation from the “Jabberwocky”, another borrowed Looking-
Glass element), that Alice’s priorities begin to shift towards finding her way home. In a musical
sequence strikingly reminiscent of a moment in Disney’s Snow White, when its heroine is also
lost in the woods, alone and frightened, Alice reveals that at this point her main goal is to return
home. This follows standard tropes of modern screenwriting; the main character begins wanting
one thing, and through a series of events leading to character development realizes that really,
they wanted something else, or should have appreciated what they had all along. However, after
her realization, Alice must detour through the croquet sequence and subsequent trial (skipping
her run-in with the Griffin and the Mock-Turtle). Notably, it is Alice who is on trial and not the
Knave of Hearts; Alice is directly in danger in a way she never is in the books, perhaps making
the film less adult in terms of vocabulary and conception but more so in terms of emotional
upheaval.
Running from the trial, Alice passes through most of the backgrounds she crossed getting
there in the first place, emphasizing that the true artistry of the film lies not so much in the
adaptations made to the story but in the images and animation created based on it. Frequently,
the film cuts classic lines from the book, including most of Alice’s inner monologue as she falls
down the rabbit hole to focus instead on the images set to music. With the use of bright colorings
for the more fantastic scenes and darker ones for the more threatening moments, certain parts of
63
exposition become irrelevant. Showcasing the artistic talent involved leads to lingering in certain
sequences that, in the books, took up less relative space. The musical numbers also take up a
large portion of the film’s time. These two feature coalesce most notably perhaps in the musical
number sung by the flowers (another Looking-Glass feature) entitled “All in the Golden
Afternoon”, in which far more flowers than are mentioned in the book skip over most of their
dialogue and instead sing as a chorus-cum-orchestra about a “golden afternoon”. The title is a
reference to the first line of the poem prefacing Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures, in which he talks
about the afternoon on which he first told the Liddell sisters the first version of Alice.
Disney’s Alice was not the first film adaptation, nor was it the last by far. It did, however,
have a lasting influence on all late films, I would argue. In a way, Disney’s Alice became a new
point of origin for modernity; in a culture generally more inclined towards movie-going than
Victorian literature, Disney’s Alice being situated as a staple childhood classic provides a basis
for Carroll’s Alice to stay relevant. The original book becomes not the point of origin in
discovering Alice but rather phase two, sought out by true devotees. Partially, this is due to
corporate ownership – the Disney corporation is one of six corporations which own, control or
produce 90% of film and television media in the world today (cf. “Media Consolidation: The
Illusion”). Thus, Disney can both increase air time for its own movie on television as well as
make sure that many of the following adaptations are slated as sequels to Disney’s first
adaptation, or use the Disney movie as their basis for understanding Alice in general. Still other
movies base their artistic content on Tenniel’s illustrations. Adaptations vary in format and
length, though they are almost universally critically despised. Failure of Alice adaptations to
perform well both critically and in almost all cases in the box office as well has in no way
dampened the enthusiasm for making them; it appears Alice is a text that cries out to be adapted,
64
perhaps because no adaptation could satisfy the longing to capture a non-existent child. The next
point of interest in examining how Alice appears in popular culture today is to view the wealth of
film material post-Disney which is currently well-known and well-liked, to analyze the trends
appearing within these adaptations and to see who Alice has become today. Over the course of
the next chapter, I will do so using primarily adaptations released in the last two decades.
65
4. “Some of the Words Have Got Altered”
31
4.1 Alice Adaptation: Commonalities and Inconsistencies
Two writers may interpret the very same data in quite different fashion, and that is precisely
the point. Any analysis of an item of folklore should begin where previous analyses have
ended. (Dundes xvi)
Having established Alice’s multiple points of origins, the next question is, what becomes of
her? Tracking the image of Alice through the years is a difficult proposition. If folklorist Alan
Dundes says new analysis should begin where the old left off, it should perhaps be taken more as
an acknowledgement of the fact that no one adaptation can be severed fully from the rich history
surrounding Alice, no matter which point of origin might be the most present in the adaptation.
This mingling of origins could include the historical, the literary, the folkloric, or the visual, but
the references to these origins do not appear separate from each other. Rather, a mixture of them
might be noticeable, or one might be the adapter’s main focus, but invariably, a multitude of
influences is present. It is this relation of adaptations to an idea of origins which I intend to track
over the course of this chapter.
One of the guiding concepts through which I analyze adaptations in this chapter is that due to
the intense interrelation between understanding of origins and understanding of the text itself,
adaptations are in and of themselves interpretations of Alice. Concurrently, I will be treating film
adaptations as a form of narrative fiction. I will accomplish this study of adaptions by examining
similarities and differences between adaptations of Alice. Most of the adaptations I examine are
film adaptations and other media adaptations released in America in roughly the last fifteen
years, which I will analyze in terms of content as well as discussing how these relate back to the
themes and trends of previous chapters. I chose this particular set of Alice adaptations based on
their popularity among a group of fans I surveyed. This is because I am interested in establishing
31
Alice to the Caterpillar, excusing her rendition of “You Are Old, Father William” (Carroll 54)
66
not only the views taken by the artists and producers who create Alice adaptations but also in
those taken by the interpretative community of fans in their consumption of said material. The
latter will be the focus of chapter five, while the former will be the discussed over the course of
this chapter. Here, I hope to show how Alice’s current portrayal in popular media, for the most
part film, is influenced both by understanding of the story’s origins as well as by current moral
beliefs regarding that origin and current artistic and narrative standards.
32
Alice adaptations, like Alice herself, come in many shapes and sizes. There are many
versions of illustration, usually based on the Tenniel drawings. That is to say, frequently the
illustrations follow the Tenniel ones in their subjects and their placement within the text. The
creation of new interpretations of each scene is done both by established artists for profit but also
among fans. There are many literary adaptations, including transformative work (fanfiction,
image editing in video format and as still images) by and for fans, as well adaptations as video
games or comics. The vast majority of Alice adaptation, however, is film material. There are a
number of basic trends within these films. In her essay “Body as Wonderland”, critic Helen
Pilinovsky sorts adaptations into “those that continue Alice’s original adventures in their
Victorian setting, those that update her still childish situation into more contemporary
circumstances, and those that diverge from their surroundings to focus on her maturation”
(Pilinovsky 176). Given that the actual sequel, “continuing Alice’s original adventures”, has
become something of a rarity, and the occasional difficulty in distinguishing between the latter
two categories, I have chosen to simplify the basic trends by which I analyze Alice films. The
two categories I will examine are “straight” adaptations seeking only to create a film version of
32
While there are also several surrealist Alice adaptations and adaptations with agendas in the
context of trends in the art world, I have chosen not to discuss these here and focus instead on the
popular films as my interest lies in reception as well as production.
67
the books, and “adult” adaptations, in which Alice as a character is made into an adult and the
content of the film is darker and intended for an older audience. Pilinovsky’s categories remain
relevant, however, in thinking about adaptations, as the changes to Alice’s character, either in
terms of how she acts or in terms of how old she is, are central in analyzing adaptations. Most of
these films share the same title, Alice in Wonderland, which is not in fact the original title of
Carroll’s books, but rather acknowledges their iconic status. This probably stems from the
Disney movie, but the question is why the alteration happens in the first place – to indicate it is
not the same content as the book? To remove the active part Alice takes in the title Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland? To remove the plurality of plots implied in “Adventures”? At any
rate, the name becomes tied to the plethora of adapted material sharing it, providing this more
generic title with a sense of malleability.
Most of the post-1951 versions of Alice are live-action, though there are a few more animated
versions. Many newer adaptations also feature computer generated imaging (CGI) to portray
Wonderland itself, which can become the central focus of the adaptation if, as mentioned in
chapter three, a new portrayal of setting and scenery is where the adaptation shines. In Will
Brooker’s Alice’s Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Media, he analyzes five Alice film
adaptations which stay fairly close to the source material and establishes certain commonalities.
Why, then, do all these adaptations, despite their variation, feature the Tea Party, the White
Rabbit, the Caterpillar, the croquet game and […] the “Drink Me” bottle and the “Eat Me”
cake? The only reasonable explanation is that these are regarded as iconic elements without
which the story would seem lacking, that each director sees them as necessary to and
expected of Alice in Wonderland, whatever other changes are made to the plot and detail.
(Brooker 205)
According to Brooker, there are a number of standard features in each adaptation. Without them,
a film is not recognizable as an Alice adaptation. In lieu of adapting the plot or the major themes
of the text, neither of which are apparent in Alice, Brooker suggests that directors adapt those
68
moments from the text which are the most iconic. There are a few other commonalities he cites,
such as Alice entering Wonderland through “some form of tunnel or hole” (Brooker 203) and the
fact that “we have to see Alice in the real world for Wonderland to figure as a dream” (Brooker
204). Brooker examines these sequences closely, establishing that none of them are truly
necessary. For instance, the size changes Alice goes through are adapted fairly faithfully, though
arguably they could be diminished in number
33
, or eradicated entirely without losing much as
they are often not mentioned again after they occur. However, Alice without her size changes
would no longer be Alice. This is not to say that these particular traits are set in stone - which
stations precisely occur is up to the interpreter, but a few of them appear fairly consistently as
inalienable parts of the story. Why exactly it is these sequences which are iconic and not Humpty
Dumpty or Alice meeting the Duchess remains an enigma; Brooker suggests that “the powerful
and pervasive influence of Disney’s retellings” (Brooker 205) is to blame. In a way, what is
acknowledged by giving Disney credit for the trends in adaptation is that each adaptation
influences the next, and the process of making certain scenes iconic more than others is a self-
sustaining cycle. The act of viewing a scene as iconic enough to be included in an adaptation is
what makes it iconic enough to be included in future adaptations.
The standard Alice adaptation in film exhibits a heavy focus on scenery; it features usually a
cast of famous actors in minor roles with an ingénue in Alice’s role. Frequently, the film is put
together by mixing the sequences of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the
Looking-Glass to form one cohesive whole, usually referred to as “Wonderland”. Film or stage
33
In the book, Alice first changes size after falling into Wonderland through the rabbit hole, she
drinks the “Drink Me” bottle and shrinks, and then eats the “Eat Me” cake and grows. Then, she
cries, and as she cries, she shrinks again. In Frederick Rabbit’s house, she drinks another bottle
and becomes too large to fit in the house, and then eats another cake and slips out through the
doorway, and finally, when she finds the Caterpillar, he tells her which parts of the mushroom to
eat to effect which change, giving her control of her size.
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adaptations also often use the poetry-heavy source text as an origin for musical adaptation.
Generally, these songs are neither well-remembered nor well-reviewed. Notable examples of this
type of movie include the 1973 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, starring Fiona Fullerton and
directed by William Sterling, Alice in Wonderland (1983), a filmed stage performance directed
by Kirk Browning, and Alice in Wonderland (1999), directed by Nick Willing
34
. These are only
three among a list containing over forty adaptations; they are simply some of the currently better-
remembered “straight” adaptations. Here, the above tropes and sequences Brooker mention are
easily spotted; by contrast, adaptations seeking to expand the material or provide an “adult” Alice
use a number of different techniques.
More adult or contemporary films, TV shows and other forms of media based on Alice
include Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland
35
and Nick Willing’s 2009 Alice
36
. Additionally,
currently well-remembered adaptations of Alice not in film format which aspire towards a more
adult aesthetic include Frank Beddor’s young adult book trilogy The Looking-Glass Wars
37
,
American McGee’s 2000 computer game Alice
38
. These adaptations do not necessarily exhibit
Brooker’s list of scenes that must occur in a recognizable fashion. Largely, this is because these
adaptations assume familiarity with the source material. They assume that the viewer has seen
these scenes before and subvert them rather than showing ‘tired’ or overly familiar material
again. This is especially noticeable in Tim Burton’s adaptation – here, an adult Alice who
assumes her childhood experience in Wonderland was a fanciful dream wanders through the
scenery of Wonderland and finds herself experiencing déjà vu, culminating in her confrontation
34
see Appendix B, Fig. 1
35
see Appendix B 3
36
see Appendix B 2
37
see Appendix C 1
38
see Appendix C 2
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by Wonderland’s inhabitants. The movie functions as something of a sequel to the original
Disney movie, being a product of the Disney corporation. It is one of only two well-remembered
adaptations which is conceived as a sequel (the other being American McGee’s Alice).
Changing in the character of Alice is what provides many of these adaptations with a plot and
a forward drive. In all cases listed above, she is an adult, or at least an adolescent, and her
presence in Wonderland can no longer be simply a dream. For Burton, she is the savior, returned
as an adult to Wonderland to release its inhabitants from the rule of the Red Queen (a synthesis
of both Red Queen and Queen of Hearts)
39
. For Frank Beddor, Alice is really Alice Liddell, but
Alice Liddell is the orphaned princess of Wonderland whose parents sent her into the parallel
dimension of Oxford, England, where her story was completely bowdlerized by Charles
Dodgson
40
. The American McGee computer game adaptation has a troubled teenager battling her
own psyche in a series of fights against Wonderland characters; the Willing version features an
Alice entirely unrelated to Carroll’s Alice who, again, must save Wonderland from the evil
Queen’s dominion
41
. In all cases, Alice’s stature as a pawn (literally, in Through the Looking-
Glass) must be called into question in order for her to be a leading, adult character. Whimsy and
coincidence are no longer sufficient explanations for Wonderland and her role within it; Alice
requires both an internal character arc and an external plot to become feasible on the screen.
As a case in point, Nick Willing’s Alice forms part of a larger trajectory. Willing, having
directed the live-action children’s movie Alice in Wonderland in 1999, a fairly faithful rendition
of the books, returns to Alice in 2009, with a made-for-TV two-part miniseries entitled simply
Alice. Willing is neither an influential Hollywood director, nor were his films released in
39
see Appendix B3
40
see Appendix C1
41
see Appendix C2
71
cinemas, they went straight to TV. However, given their recent release and the high video
quality, his adaptations are well-remembered and well-preserved, available on Youtube and
Netflix. Additionally, most Alice movies prior to Willing’s received uniformly terrible reviews,
making each new version which was not widely reported upon release potentially superior to its
predecessors. This is not to say that Willing’s versions received glowing praise – no Alice
adaptation has had that honor – but they were relatively unknown at the time of release and have
since garnered fan followings, as have most of the still well-known films. In analyzing popular
films, this shows a gap between critical reception and actual popularity, given that if only critical
and commercial success were measured, no Alice adaptation would stand out. In terms of
popularity, however, Nick Willing’s adaptations are still doing fairly well.
Willing’s 2009 Alice followed his 2007 miniseries “Tin Man”, a similar darker-and-grittier
spin on L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz. In a way, this makes Alice a part of a larger dialogue, one
that includes The Wizard of Oz and J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, which merited its own spin-off in
2011 (Neverland), also directed by Willing. This dialogue is one of genre, all three belonging to
the category of children’s fantasy now being adapted for young adult to adult audiences. The
Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan originated in the early 20
th
century, roughly forty years after Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland were published. However, all three were made into classic children’s
musical movies in the mid 20
th
century, first the live-action MGM film The Wizard of Oz in 1939
and then Disney’s Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan, in 1951 and 1953 respectively. It is
partially this temporal association with each other as well as with Disney’s Snow White (1937),
Cinderella (1950) and Sleeping Beauty (1959), all based on Grimm’s fairy tales, which has
maintained a connection of the three with the loose category of 20
th
century American notions of
the updated “fairy tale”. Carolyn Sigler tracks the Alice-type narrative through magazines and
72
books that, while popular at the time, are for the most part lost to the casual modern consumer.
While she, she makes no explicit connection between Alice and J.M.Barrie’s Peter Pan or L.
Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, there are a few striking resemblances: all three feature young girls
whisked away into fantastic magical lands; all three are episodic in one form or another, Alice
and Peter Pan more so than The Wizard of Oz, which was released as a series. Baum even cited
Alice as an inspiration for his work. A brief look at these parallel traditions helps us to
understand how the coinciding timing of seminal musical adaptations for children have led all
three works to a similar status in modern works adapting them. Alice being the first of them, this
also demonstrates how Alice’s quasi-fairy tale role and contested past have influenced similar
works.
Of the three authors, only Baum escaped accusations of pedophilia due to connections to
young children; this is perhaps because both Barrie and Carroll are supposed to have based their
most famous literary characters on real child acquaintances. Nonetheless, all three texts and
characters are in a way iconic and “belong together” typologically. This association, creating the
odd not-quite-fairy-tale aesthetic of the works and their adaptations, which are numerous in all
cases, informs some of the choices in Willing’s directorial work. The scenery especially in Alice
(2009) is far removed from the pastoral imagery of Carroll’s original and instead features
untamed forests with no pathways, broad open rivers and lakes as well as dilapidated cityscapes;
the sprawl of this world is perhaps more Oz than Wonderland, or more American than British.
Additionally, the link between the three stories and the fairy tale genre is not limited to Willing’s
involvement: the Disney-owned ABC series Once Upon A Time features characters from all
73
three stories
42
. Once Upon A Time is another adaptation involving Alice, even having a spin-off
entitled Once Upon A Time in Wonderland, focusing on Alice characters introduced in the
original show. This series is an especially interesting case, as the source material referenced is
largely from the Disney movies because both the show and the network producing it are owned
by Disney, while more threatening aspects of older versions of fairy tales are drawn in to create
higher stakes for a presumed adult viewing audience.
The association of these three texts with each other is enough to create a sub-genre, but their
association with fairy tales is what ultimately causes the wealth of adapted material. Alice’s
relation to fairy tales and visual media predates film versions, as discussed in chapters two and
three, which explains why there are more versions of Alice than of either of the other two; Peter
Pan was not illustrated and the original illustrations in Baum’s book did not become quite as
famous as Tenniel’s Alice illustrations. Their origin stories, while famous, also did not become
quite as pervasively popular as Alice’s. Likewise, Alice is never outshined by her surroundings in
Carroll’s books – she remains quite firmly the center of attention no matter how bizarre
Wonderland becomes. The same cannot be said of Peter Pan or the Wizard of Oz
43
, but then,
both Peter Pan and the Wizard of Oz have stakes and a plot. On the whole, however, the
connection among these texts provides Alice with a status to boast, as part of a subgenre of
42
While Disney owns the rights to their own film versions of Alice and Peter Pan, imagery from
which heavily influences their representation in Once Upon A Time, they do not own the rights to
the Warner Bros. film The Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum’s books, however, are in the public
domain. Once Upon A Time also takes place partially in the modern world and partially in the
“enchanted forest” – the setting of all fairy tales. The separation of characters from setting allows
for greater variability in their interpretation.
43
Wendy and Peter Pan feature equally as protagonists in Peter Pan in addition to much time
and focus of the book being spent on Captain Hook, the Lost Boys and other characters. While
Dorothy may begin as the protagonist of The Wizard of Oz, the books became a successful
franchise and especially in later parts other characters begin to eclipse her, including characters
native to Oz.
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fantasy or of children’s literature, a place in a literary trajectory that marks it as something other
than ‘unique’. As for the association of all three narratives with fairy tales, partially the timing of
the Disney adaptations is to blame and partially Alice’s longstanding association with fairy tales.
Either way, the fairy tale connection provides a solid basis for adaptability in that fairy tales are
frequently rewritten or turned into films updating their moral content for new readers or
audiences. Alice may not purport to have moral content, but a new moral context for readers in
the late 20
th
and early 21
st
century in fact does exist and demands an updating and re-envisioning
of the material.
These more adult versions showcase a different understanding of Alice’s role in Wonderland
as their primary feature. She needs to have a purpose there, and frequently, the characters are not
“mad”, they are misunderstood or subjected, and it is her role to save them in some way.
Wonderland frequently becomes a metaphor for sociopolitical injustice in these forms of
adaptation, or else a metaphor for Alice’s own process of self-actualization. Wonderland is the
threat, Alice is the solution – very much unlike Carroll’s text, in which Alice acts as creator and
destroyer of world unto herself, as well as unwitting pawn and helpless child. It could be argued
that taking Carroll’s text at face value gives Alice’s character greater depth than many of the
adaptations of it do – then again, the adult adaptations especially focus heavily on fleshing out
Wonderland and its inhabitants, making it a real space as opposed to an imagined one (after all,
who doesn’t have an image in their minds of what Wonderland looks like?). In context with
Pilinovsky’s argumentation that Alice adaptations tend to either focus on a modernization of
Alice’s content or a maturation of Alice’s character, the two trends of adaptation I examine
reveal similar interests. In the “straight” adaptation, the focus is on Alice’s maturation, while in
the more adult retelling, Alice is lifted into more contemporary circumstances and taken as a
75
blank slate upon which to write. This deletion of Alice’s complexity perhaps explains her
frequently being acted by a young, unknown actress – she will not inspire the same level of
recognition and of prejudice a known actress would. Alice, both in body and in spirit becomes
unrecognizable in these retellings.
4.2 “Narrativizing” – Plot Conventions in Film Media
How, then, is Alice remade as a character to fit a modern film schema? One of the most
important differences between books and film, especially in the latter part of the 20
th
century and
early 21
st
century, is the plot conventions involved in the latter. Film is not, or at least has not
been, popularly utilized as a medium for vignette, arguably the form closest to Carroll’ s original
text. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, as has been discussed previously, consists largely of
vignettes. Thus, the primary challenge faced by directors in adapting Alice is creating a narrative
arc familiar enough to a film audience so as not to alienate casual moviegoers, as well as an
adaptation of the source material faithful enough to not alienate Alice fans. Alternatively, of
course, some of the adaptors choose only to satisfy one of these two groups of viewers. Many of
the adaptations feature a coming-of-age story for Alice. In Disney’s version, her character arc in
Wonderland is understanding that she wants to go home. This adaptation is not heavy on plot;
the New York Times characterized it as having a “a somewhat slow, uneven pace” (Crowther).
The only real plot thread is Alice’s emotional state. The same is true for Nick Willing’s 1999
adaptation, though it has a clearer progression in terms of Alice’s development – she begins
being scared of performing in front of her parents’ tea party, and during her wanderings through
Wonderland she becomes “confident”. If Alice was too “cold” (Gabler 486) for Disney, the
primary goal in adapting her for the screen later is to give her a purpose, a challenge to
overcome, a form of personal growth to tie together her disparate adventures.
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Willing makes a number of marked stylistic departures from the 1951 version in his 1999
film. Orienting himself more clearly to Tenniel’s illustrations than other any previous film
adaptation, he chooses to have Alice appear as a brunette in a yellow dress
44
, following the
original coloring of Tenniel’s illustrations from The Nursery Alice
45
. Where the Disney Alice
was always falling, being swept along by the hectic pace of animation – perhaps most
memorably during her initial fall down the rabbit-hole, where her skirt becomes a parachute and
she gently sways through a series of backgrounds, exposing her undergarments – Willing’s
Alice, portrayed by Tina Marjorino, is far more staid and dignified. The overarching theme of the
adaptation is performance; Alice is supposed to perform at her parent’s garden party and is afraid
to, thus transforming her poetry mishaps into a sort of stage fright. Meanwhile, the poetry recited
by the inhabitants of Wonderland is often transmogrified into musical form and is presents an
opportunity for her to overcome her fear of performance. Willing’s 1999 Alice has more of the
book’s negative characteristics than does her Disney counterpart. Even so, She does not insult
the Wonderland residents; she does lose her temper frequently, with the Caterpillar and the Mad
Hatter, and finally with the Queen of Hearts herself. Due to the contrivance of her performance
anxiety, she is also far more shy and reticent than other Alices. Willing admits that he had “a
rough time trying to translate” (Willing) Carroll’s Alice into a movie due to the lack of a plot; by
doing so, he implies that in the medium of film, stories cannot be told as a series of vignettes.
Moreover, he implies that there must be a story that is told in a form readily understood by
popular audiences.
The more adult adaptations go to greater lengths to connect the sequences within Alice; as
mentioned above, these versions often have some form of social or political commentary
44
Appendix A fig. 12
45
Appendix A, fig. 9
77
involved. This serves in some way to demote Alice’s quest for identity; the larger stakes of
Wonderland’s future as a whole often determine the denouement, and while Alice’s self-
actualization is part of creating this finale, they are only the set-up, not the pay-off. For instance,
in Willing’s 1999 adaptation of the book, intended for a family audience, the plot he invents to
make the book a palatable film is essentially rooted in the frame narrative, in the real world, and
the major developments are centered on Alice’s internal state. By contrast, in Willing’s 2009
Alice, the protagonist of the film is not the real Alice, which is made clear from the start. She is
established as a savior, but her role has been predetermined by a set of events and the actions of
characters prior to her arrival; she becomes once again a pawn, though she is masquerading as a
knight.
This is evidenced in that most of the major dramatic moments of the adaptation are
transmitted to male characters. Alice’s emotional stakes are in finding her father and her
relationships with Jack and Hatter, all of which are resolved by the men, not her. In the third act
of the series (if a three-act structure is applicable, which is by no means certain), these threads
are all tied up; the King of Hearts and the Knave of Hearts (both sympathetic characters) stand
up to the Queen of Hearts, Charlie the White Knight at last is allowed to be heroic, the Carpenter
remembers Alice is his daughter and allows himself to be killed to save her. Finally, Hatter wins
over Alice. Alice’s main contributions to emotional catharsis are to make peace with her lifelong
quest to find her father, arguably accomplished by the Carpenter’s death scene, and turning down
Jack’s proposal of marriage.
Ironically given the fact that it is titled “Alice”, the 2009 miniseries is the adaptation that
focuses the least on her; both Disney’s 1951 version and Willing’s 1999 version (both intended
as movie versions of the book, not addressed to an adult audience) follow the structure of the
78
books, thus simply tailing Alice’s wanderings through Wonderland with a camera and allowing
her more of a stake in the story. Even Burton, who goes to greater lengths to create a Hollywood
plot and an adult version of the story, rarely strays from Alice’s story; if and when he does, it is
only to show other characters talking about her. Willing’s 2009 Alice on the other hand becomes
one central part in a large ensemble cast. While she is unquestionably the lead character, her arc
mainly establishes that her own interests are not as important as the fate of Wonderland as a
whole.
Tim Burton’s 2010 version also expands the role of the male cast members to be central and
includes a romantic plot. In most adaptations featuring an adult Alice, this is fairly common,
perhaps because Hollywood plot conventions demand this for a leading adult female in film. In
this version, the Hatter and the Knave of Hearts both become love interests, Hatter for Alice,
though it is never explicitly stated and she chooses to leave Wonderland in the end, and the
Knave of Hearts for the Red Queen. The latter is particularly interesting as the Red Queen’s
attraction to and dependence on the Knave of Hearts is the only mitigating feature of her
imperious personality, and it is portrayed as a misguided, one-sided feeling. Perhaps the most
interesting feature of this film is the shift of focus from Alice’s size changes to her costume
changes. She wears a blue dress – unsurprising, given that this is a Disney production – but
unlike in the other versions, when her size changes, her clothing does not. Thus after her initial
sequence of falling and drinking from the “Drink Me” bottle, she ends up dressed in what were
before her underclothes, and, going along with a few further size changes, has three more
costume changes, all of which are given more attention than her actual size. For an adult Alice,
the modesty of her changing body is seemingly more important than the body itself; or, for a 3D
moviegoer, the rendering of fabrics is more visually interesting than allowing her to wear the
79
same dress throughout the movie. In conjunction with the focus on the romantic subplots,
Wonderland loses some of its childish connotations; characters who were nonsensical in
Disney’s version claim to be mad still but portray an adult depth of emotion as well as entirely
un-humorous stakes in a clearly deadly political standoff. One scene features Alice breaking into
the Red Queen’s palace by jumping over the moat on the heads of decapitated dissenters.
In any and all cases, the changes of adaptation are most visible in terms of Alice herself. She
is changed from the prudish, confused, occasionally violent child in Carroll’s tale to a tamer,
more palatable version of herself. Wonderland and Alice are no longer one entity, they enter into
opposition. Alice becomes the straight man Disney pushed her into being, and Wonderland and
its inhabitants takes on all the chaotic, destructive elements originally found within the
protagonist of the text. This is a more normative reading than Carroll perhaps indicated: in the
original text, Alice has been told to be disciplined but she does not succeed at enacting
discipline. In adaptation, she is a much clearer example of discipline for other children and
women to emulate. She is certainly also a more self-aware version, at least by modern standards
of self-awareness: Alice has a fear or a challenge to overcome, and so too she interacts with a
cast of characters who are significantly less mad and significantly more capable of providing life
wisdom as well as relevance to the story beyond their single chapter appearances in the original.
Perhaps the key here is continuity – allowing characters more movement between scenes, where
in Alice’s Adventures, they were largely only present in their own particular chapter and perhaps
the trial scene at the end of the book, and in Through the Looking-Glass, they were essentially
limited to their one-chapter appearances. Thus, in new imaginings, Alice is not quite so alone;
thus, Wonderland is more dynamic than a series of sets. In order to contain an appropriate
narrative arc, the characteristic vignette style of the original books and the opacity both of
80
Alice’s character and motivation as a little girl who cannot see beyond her schooling into
understanding the nonsense she is confronted with must be altered; characters cannot simply be
mad and Alice must be analyzable.
As I have demonstrated, commercial film adaptations of Alice abide by certain standards of
plot convention and character development. In order to fit these standards, Alice has had to grow
and change with the times, sometimes literally into being an adult character. Even when she is
portrayed as a child, however, she is held to a standard of behavior Carroll did not endorse or
represent. She is consistently good and unambiguous; there is nothing in her that would be
capable of creating the Queen of Hearts, and yet, that is exactly what she does in dreams. At least
partially, this can be explained by trends in understanding childhood. Valerie Walkerdine’s
analysis shows that “a playful and assertive girl may be understood as forward, uppity, over-
mature, too precocious” (Walkerdine 256). Perhaps ‘playful’ would always have been the wrong
word to describe Alice, but over-mature and precocious are certainly apt. If these traits are no
longer desirable in a female child portrayed through mass media, it certainly explains why Alice
must either become bland, grow up or both in later versions of Carroll’s source text. Likewise,
with the wealth of scholarship surrounding Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell, the source
material as well becomes interpreted as intrinsically adult. Jacqueline S. Rose argues out of the
rumors of pedophilia surrounding both Alice and Peter Pan that the prospect of writing a
children’s story is a fundamental impossibility. “This is to describe children’s fiction, quite
deliberately, as something of a soliciting” (Rose 59) is how she begins her section on Alice,
highlighting the notion that all children’s literature, and by extension, film intended for children,
is made by adults imagining what could appeal to a child enough for them to pay attention. In
that case, it is not the child reading or watching Alice who has changed in the interim years,
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necessarily, but rather it is the imagination adults have of that child, and it would appear that
over the years, the imagining of that child has decreased in complexity, while the fear of the
dangers she may face in an unfamiliar set of circumstance has increased exponentially.
While it can reasonably be stated that the larger network of cultural understanding of
childhood remains on a subconscious level for most producers of Alice adaptations, it is not only
the advancement of plot that drives adaptation. Ulterior motives of the adaptors are often part
and parcel of the adaptation. Carolyn Sigler already notes this in her chapter on topical parodies
of Alice, many of which featured sections of political ‘whimsy’ such as the Downing Street
“ineptitude” (Sigler 332). As time progressed and different artistic and cultural trends took place,
the faces Alice took also varied. The “satirical use of Alice continued far beyond the end of
World War II” (Brooker 78), Dali painted an Alice-inspired series in 1969 (cf. Brooker 79), and
psychoanalytic interpretation favored the pedophilic interpretation of Carroll’s life and works. In
the 1960s, “psychedelic” (Brooker 81) interpretations came to the fore, leading to the summarily
rejected notion that Carroll was an opium addict. Currently, Alice is continually adapted and
readapted by divergent interpreters as seen in the above examples of films, television shows and
computer games, never appearing in quite the same guise but always claiming to be about the
same character. In Michael Hancher’s words, “the threatened disintegration of Alice’s personal
identity in Wonderland prefigures her actual dispersal, and renewal, among her audiences”
(Hancher 202). The argument here is that because Alice’s identity, or lack thereof, is what is at
stake in her travails through Wonderland (her changing size, her constant confusion as to who
she is, what she actually knows and what she misremembers), her identity becomes so unfocused
to her audience that she can take on any guise.
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Perhaps it is her very unmooredness which gives Alice flexibility as a text and as an icon.
She has been interpreted as an adult, as a feminist, as a victim and as a destroyer of worlds,
though all the source text claims to represent is an ordinary Victorian child. It is notable that
when the interpreter is interested in Victorian times, Alice becomes the purest representation of
all things Victorian; when he or she is interested in something else, Alice becomes simply a
“universal” child. Even her femininity is occasionally eradicated in interpretation, when she
stands in as this “universal” child. In other cases, when the focus of adaptations draws strongly
on Carroll’s perceived relationship with Alice Liddell, it becomes a focal point. When she is
interpreted an adult woman, she must abide by the rules of adult women in modern society and
be neither as spoiled nor as petulant as her 1865 self was. The success of an Alice adaptation
hangs on how important or unimportant her origins are to both the creator of the adaptation and
the audience for that adaptation. Characters, themes and quotes from Alice have a way of seeping
into popular culture the way poetry and reference from Victorian times seep into Alice: such
allusions may be read as intentional, harmless whimsy to casual readers who are not in the know
and sly asides to a reader-in-the-know. This latter group, fans of Alice in original and adaptation,
now form an important part in understanding who Alice has become today and why she is still
relevant. Over the course of the next chapter, reader and viewer preferences about and opinions
on the adaptations discussed in this section will be analyzed through the medium of fan cultures
on the internet.
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5. “She, Too, Began Dreaming After A Fashion”
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5.1 Alice
Fans Describe Themselves
In the previous chapters, I have asked how. How did Alice come into being, what were the
historical factors that influenced the kind of childhood described in the text? How did Alice and
Lewis Carroll relate to that childhood? What about this text and its origin either in relation to
folklore or fairy tale traditions has made it so susceptible to retelling, and how have those
retellings been enacted? How has the transition into visual media affected retelling and what
about Alice enables an easy step into visual as well as narrative realization in film? Some
portions of this analysis point to more deep-seated questions – why is it that fairy tale is a genre
more suited to retelling than others? Why does the connection between Carroll and pedophilia
strike such a chord with biographers and adapters alike? In this chapter, it is the ‘why’ question I
am interested in. Specifically, it is the question of why do people care so much about Alice, about
whether or not Carroll was a pedophile, about which adaptation is a faithful one? In order to
tackle this question, I conducted a survey with online fans of Alice whom I found through the
blogging site Tumblr. I chose fans using this medium due to the high collaboration of fans on
Tumblr, which is a very interactive site. These fans also engage with Alice as an adapted and
adaptable source, unlike a book club or a purely Carroll-based fan group might; the Alice fans I
surveyed interact with multiple versions of the story daily. In the survey, I ask them to describe
both their media intake and relationship with that media, as well as why they personally are
interested in Alice. While this survey may not fully answer why anyone should care about Alice
to adapt or retell Carroll’s story or even fully explain why those who care do, it does offer a
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After Alice wakes up from her dream about Wonderland, she describes it to her sister, who
drifts into a daydream in which she imagines Alice maintaining her sense of whimsy as an adult
(Carroll 131)
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window into what makes Alice remain relevant to ordinary readers, and what fans today, looking
back at the century and a half of material about, based on or referencing Alice, believe to be
important. These fans provide the other side of the coin for the adapters of Alice in film. Where
in chapter four, I argued that adapters are inevitably interpreters, these fans, who are primarily
readers, all describe themselves as writers. This means that Alice fans on Tumblr are both
interpreters and adapters, both of Carroll’s book and of the subsequent adapted works based on
it. Seeking out fans’ own estimation of why they prefer one work over another and what the
stakes in analyzing Alice’s origins are may not provide conclusive answers, but it does provide a
context for Alice’s continued popularity.
The survey I conducted with these fans was built around a set of questions with the intent of
gathering a qualitative response to what motivates their readerly interest in Alice. In total, I
gathered responses from 14 Alice fans, most of whom are Americans. Some questions were
multiple choice, but most required written responses. The majority of my survey results were
created by submitting the link to the a blog author going by the name “Phantomwise” on tumblr,
who takes submissions from readers and posted a link to my survey publicly. I received ten
responses from this alone. The other responses I gathered were derived from sending messages
other Carrollian bloggers and, in a few cases, leaving reviews on transformative works based on
various Alice material. In terms of demographics, my survey respondents were fairly conform to
the general demographics of Tumblr. The majority of the participants are in their early twenties,
with only three below the age of nineteen and three above the age of twenty-five. All except one
identify themselves as female, and most (eight) are students. Only one lists their occupation as a
“Lewis Carroll Scholar” (Respondent 9). All respondents but one view themselves as writers; all
of them regularly read both books and online content as well as consume movies and TV.
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Notably, many of them consume these media via the internet both in the form of online content
and by streaming television and/or movies online; the computer they use to create output is thus
also their main source of input.
In terms of which adaptations survey respondents are familiar with, a few trends are evident.
For one, many of the responses were limited to more recent adaptations or adaptations created by
major networks or production houses, indicating that these readers consume primarily popular
media. When listing the versions with which they were familiar, eleven out of fourteen survey
respondents included the 1951 Disney animated musical. Seven cite it as their first exposure to
the Alice story; four more can’t remember if it was the movie or the original books. Four cite it
as one of their favorite (if not their only favorite) versions of the Alice story. By contrast, nine
participants include the original books as the “original version” (Respondent 12) in the list of
versions they are familiar with, while six claim it as one of their favorites. It is curious that a
majority of participants would think of the original books only as a version of the Alice narrative,
curiouser still, to quote Alice herself, that fewer of them recall the books as their first exposure
but more of them list it as a favorite. Of those that list Disney’s version as a favorite, two do so
primarily because of “loyalty” to it as their first introduction to Carroll’s tale. As for awareness
of other adaptations, the most widely known by far are Willing’s 1999 version, which seven out
of fourteen respondents have seen; his 2009 version, which seven out of fourteen have seen; and
Tim Burton’s 2010 film, which twelve out of fourteen cite as important. Additionally, Frank
Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars are mentioned by five respondents, while American McGee’s
Alice in Wonderland, is mentioned by six respondents. Finally, Once Upon A Time in
Wonderland is mentioned by five respondents, though most of them add that they haven’t seen it,
only heard of it, and only one lists it as a favorite retelling. While further accounts of versions of
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Alice provided by survey respondents are manifold, these were the only ones I found to achieve
something approaching a consensus.
What these responses indicate is that an idea of two origins of Alice is maintained by many
fans. Disney’s Alice and the original books are in one way or another presented as important
source texts by all respondents, and they both form an “originary” point of access. Despite the
fairytale connection of the Alice text, making it appear more a part of public property than many
books
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, most survey respondents describe their relationship to the original book as akin to
viewing an art artifact rather than as the basis of a nostalgic childhood memory. Only four
participants think it might have been the first version they were exposed to, though they are not
positive, as it could have been the Disney movie as well. When explaining why it is nonetheless
a favorite, most respondents praise Carroll’s writing on a stylistic level, “the depth of
storytelling, wit, prose” rather than on the level of personal relevance to their lives (Respondent
6).
By contrast, when describing why Disney’s 1951 animated film is a favorite, respondents
praise Disney’s animation and the nostalgic childhood value of the film. For Disney’s version,
eleven participants are fairly certain it was the first version they saw; the affective connection to
the film version is based more on factors such as it being “the first one I was introduced to so it
still stayed with me the most” (Respondent 5). Nostalgia becomes a favorite explanation for
enjoyment of the Disney movie more than an attempt at establishing the movie’s objective
quality. In essence, the factor of being introduced to Alice through Disney is what makes it a
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In terms of copyright law, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been in the public domain
since 1907, while Through the Looking-Glass has been since 1948. Tenniel’s illustrations have
been available since 1964. The real difference between the way any other book is perceived and
Alice is authorship. With fairy tales, authorship is often ignored, with Alice, authorship is
tantamount, but the wealth of retelling allows for a sense of public property
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favorite. Thus, for this respondent, and others who state similar emotional attachments to the
Disney movie, it is an origin which to them is the most compelling. Carroll’s book may have
been the precedent historically, but to these respondents, in terms of their own relation to Alice, it
came later.
One respondent lists both the books and the movie as personal favorites. She is
“particular” to the books and enjoys “the vernacular”, but when speaking about the movie she
says “her loyalty and preference” is to the Disney version because “it has literally shaped who I
am today” (Respondent 8). The depth of connection to the movie is clearly much stronger for
this individual, and while she values the books as sharing in her conception of the original, she
remembers them more as an afterthought to her first encounter. In fact, she continues, “it’s great
fun to enjoy it as if you were a child” (Respondent 8), indicating that while the Disney movie has
nostalgic value and a direct tie to her childhood, the original books she values on a less personal
level and can only imagine what it would feel like to have such a formative connection with
them. This layer of only being able to enjoy Alice by imagining oneself as a child when one is an
adult reader is important. Alice is a book that children can’t quite grasp yet but adults can
appreciate because it reminds them of a childhood they might never have experienced – the
idyllic, fanciful notion of Victorian childhood presented in modern adaptations of Alice.
Furthermore, adult respondents demonstrate a grasp of the nuance embedded in Alice after years
of interpretation and adaptation; perhaps this particular reader is really simply implying that to
truly enjoy Alice one must let the nuance go, or read ‘like a child’ once more. Given that most of
the respondents are in their early twenties and childhood is not as far behind for them as
nostalgia would imply, it seems the fondness for Alice has to do more with a larger value being
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given childhood and the memory thereof rather than the concrete childhoods experienced by
these respondents.
Especially with “children’s” stories – recall, there is a certain ambiguity to the propriety
and indeed intention of any and all versions of such narratives for a child audience – nostalgic
value seems to be key in their continued appeal to adults. On the level of marketing, this is
certainly part of why “grown-up” Alices, e.g. SyFy’s Alice (2009), Burton’s Alice in Wonderland
(2010), ABC’s Once Upon a Time in Wonderland (2013)
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, inevitably feature stock references to
the original text, ranging from costume design for the Alice character and cameo appearances of
characters from the original. This tendency stretches to fragments of dialogue or poetry
resituated within the text. Some references are obvious to even a casual viewer of Disney’s film
looking to spot such allusions in these adaptations, and some are obscure enough that only a true
devotee could spot them. Nonetheless, all these references are spotted by someone, usually a fan,
and meticulously recorded both on personal blogs and on shared platforms such as Wikipedia,
allowing wider audiences to find and enjoy Alice’s influence. Nostalgic value is what inspires all
these references and adaptations; the presence of the familiar seems to inspire a curiosity in fans
to discover what has been changed even as they celebrate continuities.
Respondent 11 states, almost casually, that she feels that Alice has “visually influenced”
(Respondent 11) her more than anything, a very odd thing to say of a written narrative, but a less
odd thing to say when one observes which versions are actually known to the survey
respondents. Only one of the stories within Carolyn Sigler’s anthology of Alice-related writings
produced between 1865 and 1933 (Uncle Wiggly in Wonderland) is remembered by a survey
respondent, however twenty-five film versions are listed cumulatively in the survey, as well as a
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see Appendix B Fig. 1
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number of other works using visual means over literary (e.g. webcomics, American McGee’s
computer game. Only five out of fourteen survey respondents even knew of the same literary
adaptation, Frank Beddors Looking Glass Wars, a 2004 young adult trilogy. This is certainly
closer to popular culture than some of the more “highbrow” literary adaptations Sigler mentions
which were released after the 1930s; Beddor’s work was also released six years after her book.
However, it is also the only literary adaptation mentioned by more than one survey respondent;
by contrast, all of them mention several film adaptations, and most of the films are mentioned by
at least two survey respondents, often more. Film, specifically recent, commercially produced
film, clearly dominates the imagined response of internet fan communities at least in terms of my
own research.
Perhaps, to a young audience in the 21
st
century, the medium of film is more
approachable than literature. Then again, fan culture may also reflect Alice’s inherently visual
nature, from the Tenniel drawings onward. It seems the works known by Alice fans reflect a
broader trend towards visual culture. It is just not that they are uninterested in reading or literary
material, it is that the material which engages with Alice on the level of entertainment is no
longer released in print form. More recent books to do with Alice tend to be academic, still others
veer toward the experimental side of adult literature, engaging more thoroughly with the
pedophilia angle than with the representation of childhood
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. Fans who come to Alice via the
Disney movie, as most of these do, seem to be searching for works trying to recapture the
whimsy and playfulness they see as intrinsic to Alice. Literature is no longer a medium in which
‘recapturing’ is a sought-after trait – literary retellings are deemed derivative rather than valuable
in terms of nostalgia, while the same is not yet true in the world of film.
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For example, Katie Roiphe’s Still She Haunts Me, a fictionalized Carroll biography
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These respondents do not only react to Alice through the quantifiable lens of which
adaptations they know and whether or not they like them. One of the questions I also chose to
ask was what role Alice plays in their lives. The answers they gave here were strikingly varied.
It helped me discover myself, and it has proved to ground me when I find myself feeling lost in
life” (Respondent 7) is perhaps the most intense of these declarations of personal connection
with Alice in all her permutations, but it is a sentiment echoed both on the blogs and by the other
survey respondents. Almost all of them state a connection between their personal lives and Alice,
while also indicating a preference for at least two or more versions of it. Alice, to them, is not
static. The title “Alice in Wonderland” automatically refers to a multitude of works. Most of the
participants also create their own new content based on Alice in one way or another. When asked
what draws them to retellings, survey respondents answered both as producers and consumers,
indicating what qualities they like in a retelling as well as why they thought society as a whole
would like these qualities. The answers were largely variations on a theme: “we like to use
symbols and characters that are familiar and thus can be recognized and understood quickly by
our audience” (Respondent 11). Particularly Alice retellings “often come up when people feel out
of place” (Respondent 13), how Alice herself feels for a majority of the books. In some cases, the
point of interest for the respondent was “see[ing] the different points stressed in different
adaptation” (Respondent 5), or the simultaneous pleasure caused by nostalgic recognition of a
theme and setting without the comfort and loss of tension provided by complete familiarity.
Naturally, this is not the only motivation. To some respondents, retelling is also a good
way to “bring attention to the original” (Respondent 2) or even just “for profit” (Respondent 4)
when referring to commercially produced adaptations. This shows that these respondents have a
certain overview of market forces; they are all participants in online communities, and involved
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at least in some way in the transmission of fan content or of retellings, both in image and word.
Quite a few of the respondents who are deeply involved in bringing attention to the original and
the “true” circumstances of its conception say they are important to them by virtue of their
blogging community. However, even these more cynical responses evaluating the world outside
the fan community eventually return to “the desire to see if we can make our favourite story into
our own creation” (Respondent 4). As discussed above, most of the respondents do not limit
themselves to mentioning only one adaptation; nor do they seem to believe there is a right or
wrong way to adapt, artistically – “dark Alice”
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, meaning adaptations of Alice in which either
she or Wonderland become overtly threatening and often psychologically as well as physically
dangerous, is a preference some respondents do not personally enjoy, but do not ban entirely. It
seems their main stake is not entirely in the way the material is adapted, it is in the heart of the
matter. It is important to them that the drive to adapt Alice comes from a place of admiration and
enjoyment of the source material. In a word, it is important to them that the people adapting
Alice are to some extent fans themselves, or at least have an understanding of fandom to the
point that they will include the correct symbols and tropes, even if it is a for-profit adaptation.
5.2 The “Carrollians”: Consumers, Producers, and Interpretive Community
My main site of observing fans of Alice was on the interactive blogging site Tumblr.
Here, users create their own blogs in which they can upload and post materials they have created
themselves, i.e. still images or gifs (moving images) from various film and theater adaptations as
well as illustrations, quotes and other material surrounding Alice. Furthermore, they can “reblog”
from one another, meaning if one Tumblr user follows another, that user’s posts will appear on
the first user’s newsfeed and they can post that users content on their own blog. Reblogs contain
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Especially American McGee’s Alice (2000)
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information both on the original source of the post and the person it has been reblogged from; it
is widely considered extremely bad manners on Tumblr to erase the source notation. This
contrasts to other blogging platforms (e.g. other blogging sites or an independently owned
websites) in a number of ways. For one, creating a Tumblr is a quick and easy process, it takes
perhaps a minute and requires only an email address and a username, where other sites might
require more personal information. Creating a Tumblr automatically makes the user part of the
community: the homescreen for a Tumblr blog is the dashboard, which records the activity of all
other users being followed. Through tagging and Tumblr’s search function, it is easy to find
other users who run blogs with similar interests. In essence, Tumblr offers easy access and high
community involvement to users. Other blogging sites do not always have these options, though
some do
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. Promoting one’s own blog is one’s own responsibility – searching for material is not
as easy as it is on Tumblr. Likewise, many other sites require advertising. Alice enthusiasts who
have their own websites must pay for hosting as well as design their own layout. Tumblr is the
most accessible form of blogging as it requires less expertise and commitment, and immediately
connects to other fans. There are limits, of course – unlike a forum website, on which
conversations between users are presented in a thread, on Tumblr, conversations are private
unless users choose to publish them. This means that the main ways I could observe this
community was through what they posted, what they reblogged from each other and what they
said about each other on public posts. Additionally, I have no way of verifying the information
given to me by the bloggers I observed as I only interacted with them via Tumblr and via the
survey.
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Alternatives include blogspot, livejournal or buying a webpage domain. The former two offer
less networking abilities than tumblr, as they don’t have the option to reblog other users’ content.
The latter involves both the financial investment and the technical knowhow of creating an
individual site.
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Discovering online communities is not necessarily a straightforward task. Samuel Wilson
and Leighton Peterson discuss this in their article “The Anthropology of Online Communities”
(2002), mentioning that community as a whole “seems to imply a false circumscription and
coherence” (Wilson 455) as no individual belongs to only one community. This is compounded
in internet communities, as “a debate has continued about whether online, virtual, or otherwise
computer-mediated communities are real or imagined” (Wilson 456). The difficulty is that it is
very hard to establish shared practices, beliefs or even contact between alleged members of a
community when said community exists only virtually. On the other hand, these communities
can be seen as “speech communities” (Wilson 459), sharing similar patterns of communication
despite differing backgrounds. Myc Wiatrowski, in his article “The Dynamics of Fandom”, picks
this argument up a decade after Wilson and Peterson engage with the earlier formations of online
communities to discuss the relationship between fans and producers as well as the relationship
between fans and their urtext. Internet community formation, by virtue of its newness, is not a
terribly well-documented phenomenon
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in academic research. It is even more ill-defined than
many other forms of community simply because there is no face-to-face component and
knowledge about the participants beyond their self-stated interest in the community is not readily
accessible. Additionally, as Stephen R. Thompson points out in “Ethnomethodology and the
Study of Online Communities”, “online communities present the researcher with nothing but
text” (Thompson 11). Following the groundwork laid by these thinkers, over the course of this
subchapter I will discuss the text provided by the blog authors I studied, as well as examine how
exactly their community, such as it is, is documented.
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Except, that is, on the internet itself, where most pages can be tracked down even years after
their deletion.
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Two of the main blogs I followed throughout the duration of this project were “all-in-the-
golden-afternoon96.tumblr.com” and “still-she-haunts-me-phantomwise.tumblr.com”
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. Golden
Afternoon is a fairly new blogger who has joined the group of Carroll enthusiasts started by
Phantomwise. Golden Afternoon’s blog is a personal one which focuses for the most part on
Alice, with all non-Carroll-related posts being tagged “non Carroll post”, and a lot of her Carroll
material is reblogged from Phantomwise. This means that “all-in-the-golden-
afternoon96@tumblr.com” is the only blog Golden Afternoon runs and it contains personal
information and things of personal interest to her as well as Carroll material. Phantomwise’s blog
is not a personal one – it is a blog run by a user who has multiple blogs, and this one is dedicated
specifically to Carroll material. Phantomwise is a well-established Carroll blogger, being one of
the most-reblogged and easiest to find through Tumblr’s search function (this being how I found
these users in the first place). She is also the instigator of the group of Carroll enthusiasts I
focused on in my research, which will be elaborated on later.
One of the main markers of the style of content creation among this group is that it is
highly collaborative; users are in constant contact with one another indirectly via reblogging
each others’ posts and seeing who reblogs their own. They also communicate via submissions;
Phantomwise accepts submissions and posts them, while all tumblr users have an askbox, in
which followers can submit questions and comments. This can be done anonymously or from a
different blog. These two blogs frequently make use of each others’ material; additionally,
Golden Afternoon lists other recommended blogs on her Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
page. A major characteristic of the blogs is that authorship becomes very fluid, as users share
material and republish it, implying that they allow another users’ words or content to talk
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These users will hereafter be referred to as “Golden Afternoon” and “Phantomwise”. Both
state their preference to not reveal their real names in the “about me” sections of their blogs.
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through them, as well as releasing their own opinions and content to be shared, commented upon
and altered by other users.
I observed these blogs by becoming a tumblr user myself and following them. I found
them via the search function, and later, by tracking the tag “Carrollian”. My actual interaction
with them was limited; their posts appeared on my dashboard, enabling me to like or reblog
them, and some of them chose to follow me in return, which gave them the same ability. This
means that my observation of the blogs is limited to their public posts as well as their survey
responses; their private messages with each other, which one can surmise exist based on some of
their public posts about each other, remain a mystery.
Phantomwise’s blog has a note on the front page saying that the blog proprietor is a
supporter of Karoline Leach’s biographical position on the vexed question of Carroll’s interest in
children. Leach portrays Carroll as having meaningful relationships with adult women and
rejects the belief that Carroll was a pedophile. The author spends a good deal of time refuting
people who believe the book has anything to do with an unhealthy interest on Carroll’s part
either in Alice Liddell or Alice of the books, posting scholarly work to “prove” the contrary, and
showing excerpts from Carroll’s other writings and work frequently, to demonstrate this thesis.
The username “still she haunts me, phantomwise”, however, stems from the closing poem at the
end of Through the Looking Glass. The full stanza is,
Still she haunts me, phantomwise
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes
(Carroll 287)
Not only is it unclear as to which Alice is being spoken of in this poem, referencing the “sunny
sky” (Carroll 287) of the afternoon on which Carroll told the story, but also the role Alice takes
is not exactly as unambiguous as the blog author frequently states it is. Rather, Alice is said to be
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“haunting”, the poem’s speaker is unable to forget her. She is “never seen by waking eyes”, and
yet he is unable to let go of her image. This would seem to indicate that at least textually,
Carroll’s relationship with Alice was somewhat fraught, obsessive even. One could surmise that
choosing this particular quote as a username, even when consistently believing in, even
“championing” Carroll’s innocence and the simplicity of his works, is an acknowledgment of the
complexity of the issue. While the content of the blog denies the ambiguity, the blog itself is still
nourished by the controversy surrounding Lewis Carroll’s relationship with Alice Liddell.
Many of the blogs I am focusing on in this project openly distrust academia as they claim
the text and its author is innocent of the underlying darkness attributed them, even as there is a
countering aspiration towards academic inquiry. Blog users collect Alice material, photograph it
and share their trophies amongst each other, celebrating each others’ collections, as well as
avidly collecting secondary material such as biographies. They also cite academic arguments and
rephrase them into their own more personal emotional language. For instance, when discussing
Morton Cohen’s claim that Carroll had wanted to marry Alice Liddell, Phantomwise states that
she is “shocked that he said such misleading things and no one corrected him” (“Then Guiliano
upped…”). She goes on to discuss at great length the same primary sources Cohen is citing (the
letters exchanged between Alice Liddell and Carroll), and offers a number of other
interpretations, both citing other scholars and being clear in the matter that there may be a variety
of valid interpretations of this material. Phantomwise is “shocked” by Cohen’s conclusions, and
because she is running a blog and not writing an academic rebuttal, can subtitle a section of her
argument “Again, Cohen Reads What He Wants” (“Then, Guiliano upped…”). On the one hand,
this reveals the strong emotional attachment of this particular blogger to Carroll’s life and works,
and no hesitation in expressing her thoughts on published works. On the other, the caustic,
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cynical tone she takes towards Cohen’s thesis is one major difference between the work
Phantomwise does and that of a more traditional academic.
Such posts reveal a set of deeply personally held beliefs about academic work on
Phantomwise’s part. In a post in which the center of focus is not the veracity of the claims about
Carroll, but rather the academic trends she has noted in her extensive research on the subject,
Phantomwise announces her own “goal of educating people on Lewis Carroll” (“In my goal…”).
This post is largely disparaging of laypeople’s, but also academics’, tendency to take secondary
literature at face value as opposed to examining Carroll’s letters and diaries themselves.
Particularly Morton Cohen comes under fire frequently, as his autobiography of Carroll is “seen
by the Old Guard Carrollians as the definite and the last word” (“In my goal…”). This is an
attitude Phantomwise displays towards Cohen’s biography frequently; as Leach’s research
accords with her point of view as a more accurate portrayal of Carroll’s life by explaining the
missing parts in early Carroll biographies as an attempt on the part of Victorian relatives to
disguise his close relationships with adult women, none of whom he was married to. Cohen’s
method is not at issue in this particular post, as Phantomwise especially points out that the
biographer takes all of his material from primary sources, all of which are available to other
interested parties as well. Even those who oppose Cohen cite him rather than the primary
sources, despite Cohen’s “extraordinary habit of saying sources support his arguments when on
closer examination, they don’t” (“In my goal…”). It is this latter tendency which concerns
Phantomwise – the fact that interested parties don’t empower themselves by using the same
research methods as Cohen, as Leach, as Phantomwise herself, and come to their own
conclusions (ideally, the same conclusions Phantomwise came to).
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As a part of this quasi-scholarly interest hiding its close relationship to the format of
scholarly work, Phantomwise herself cites all her sources at the bottom of each post, as well as
mentioning these sources in each case which demands it. As a matter of fact, Phantomwise has a
post dedicated to showing users how to cite her blog in academic work. She offers citations in
multiple styles and notes that she is always happy to contribute to research on Alice. She also
notes that those interested in working on Carroll or Alice ought to use the material Phantomwise
herself cites, as it is probably “more academically reliable than a tumblr blog” (“Can I Cite
You?”). She adds that she is happy to contribute by explaining where she got her material.
Nonetheless, Phantomwise describes herself as merely a “really, really dedicated fan that
did a lot of research and spouts out useless trivia” (“Who Are You?”) as opposed to an expert. In
a way, this rejection of expertise is typical of fan groups in general; in Myc Wiatrowski’s “The
Dynamics of Fandom”, he outlines the frequent consumer-producer tension present in fan
communities. According to him, “fans use the text to create new cultural production”
(Wiatrowski) in “the battle for hegemonic control of the urtext in consumer-producer
relationships” (Wiatrowski). Wiatrowski is speaking of a very different fandom: fans of the TV
show Firefly, and its tie-in movie Serenity, whose urtext is more contained than Alice’s
sprawling history, as well as being significantly more recent. The Alice fandom has a less fraught
relationship with the market forces which created it, partially because the origin story of Alice is
so mythologized and partially because Disney’s family-friendly image has been maintained to a
certain degree by most fans. Wiatrowski describes fandom as creating itself through its
production of material within a community that is seen as “significantly different from the
mainstream norm” (Wiatrowski). In Phantomwise’s case, the rejection of such “mainstream
norm” is aimed at academic material rather than popular culture; in both cases, however, the
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rejection of the more profitable or “legitimate” form of production, either commercial or
academic, serves to disguise the similarities between for-profit and fan producers.
Wiatrowski’s definition of fandom foregrounds “being significantly different from the
mainstream norm” (Wiatrowski). He clarifies that fans are fairly normalized in society at this
point, but that fan communities still embrace this othering as a defining feature. For
Phantomwise and Golden Afternoon, this is enacted by their self-descriptions as being “really,
really dedicated” (“Who Are You?”) or even “obsessive” (“Who in the World am I?”) in the case
of Golden Afternoon, but decidedly not experts. This method of constructing themselves as
interested parties with no further professional expertise than that provided by their own interest
masks the close relationship between the way they understand and research Alice and the
academic work from which they distance themselves . This construction of the self has the side
effect of hiding the large amounts of extremely specialized knowledge held by the Alice fan
community as well as the effort they put into producing quality material. This can be seen in
Phantomwise’s posts about Cohen in that she invests significant amounts of time and research
into finding original citations from Carroll’s diaries and letters, as well as citing multiple
biographers, in order to establish her opinion as valid. On an artistic level, some Carroll fans
create their own illustrations of the books
54
or edit still or moving frames from various
adaptations to show each adaptation to its best advantage. Fans maintain the pretense of a
consumer-producer dialectic when they have become both themselves. This is compounded by
the fact that for fans among the blogger community, laptops and computers are the site both for
producing content and for consuming films and games, meaning that both activities become in a
sense part of the experience of “being online” as an Alice fan.
54
See Appendix A, Fig. 22
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Golden Afternoon, who works most closely with Phantomwise (the two users frequently
support each other’s arguments and reblog each others’ material, as well as refer to each other in
posts, although Golden Afternoon defers to Phantomwise as an instigator of the group to which
they belong), includes less academic citations, yet her FAQ is almost entirely dedicated to
Carroll sources rather than information about Alice. She, too, includes a note in the blurb on the
front page of her blog to indicate that she supports Karoline Leach’s position as a biographer.
“lewis-carroll.tumblr.com”, another user supported as a “Carrollian” according to Golden
Afternoon’s FAQ, has a far more limited “Questions” section than either Phantomwise or Golden
Afternoon, being a smaller blog; this user seems more interested in the mathematical aspect of
Alice than anything else
55
. While he or she, too, rejects the notion that Carroll was a pedophile,
“lewis-carroll.tumblr.com” states that Carroll “liked little girls at a level that was more than
normal” (“Ask Me”) – closer to an admission of abnormality in Carroll’s life and behavior than
any of the other users come. This blog is less focused on Carroll and more on Alice as a visual
phenomenon; however, it too reveals an indexical, theoretical approach to adaptation – there is a
complex tagging system which helps users navigate between every version of Alice. This
catalogue includes Tim Burton’s 2010 film and American McGee’s computer game, versions
which many of this particular group of users avoid as being too dark, too far from the source
material, or lacking in appropriately respectful affection for the subject material.
56
This group of tumblr users have created their own tag. On tumblr, tags serve to organize
material in specific ways. Thus, a tag can be searched, in this case “Carrollian”, revealing all
55
Carroll’s work as a mathematician has also been taken as an interpretive basis for a variety of
the jokes in Alice; I have chosen not to interact with this aspect of analysis as it rarely enters
popular film or discussion of the books and is largely relegated to specialist knowledge.
56
Phantomwise notes that Tim Burton “has said in interviews he never connected with the story”
(“Why don’t you post Tim Burton’s Alice?”); this is a major ground for disliking the adaptation.
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material posted with that tag. Users can also blacklist tags so they don’t have to see them. Tags
are not only a method of organizing content, however, they also are a place for blog authors to
explain their feelings on a subject outside of the post itself. They may comment on images or
citations here frequently without interfering with the integrity of the post – unless they feel the
post needs a more visible commentary. The tag is a metatextual tool allowing users to organize
their own material, search other users, and provide annotation without intruding on the content of
a post. The “Carrollian” tag, when searched, reveals a fairly specific collection of Alice in
Wonderland material.
Phantomwise, when explaining her reasons for creating the tag, says that the “Alice in
Wonderland” tag was “a mess” (“The Carrollian Tag”), as it contained too broad a spectrum of
material which frequently didn’t represent Alice or Carroll the way Phantomwise feels they
ought to be shown. The “Carrollian” tag is intended to mark material related specifically to Alice
or Carroll. She makes sure to explain that simply because she herself does not post material from
certain adaptations (notably Tim Burton and American McGee’s computer game) does not mean
that doing so is off limits, pointing to the fact that “lewis-carroll.tumblr.com” posts on both
subjects frequently and can still use the “Carrollian” tag in doing so. In terms of usage,
Phantomwise notes that the tag is not “some sort of elitist club” (“The Carrollian Tag”),
indicating that any user interested in posting material can do so, and can use the tag. However,
there is to be “no nonsense about drugs, pedophilia, or portraying Alice in a disrespectful way
(“The Carrollian Tag”). What constitutes a disrespectful way to treat Alice is left vague, perhaps
intentionally. This set of priorities reveals is that the author views the Alice fandom as a
community, stating an equality between all Alice enthusiasts by making sure to state that anyone
can use the tag, “Carrollian”. Of course, in order to use a tag, one must know it exists. Most
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Tumblr users who were raised in an English-speaking country will have heard the phrase “Alice
in Wonderland” and be able to tag accordingly, while few of them will have developed the
specialized interest to find a blog author like Phantomwise and begin using the tag “Carrollian”,
limiting users of the tag. As one of the originators of the tag, Phantomwise also claims a sense of
propriety (or even authorship) over it in that there is a code of conduct she wants to instill,
namely an interpretation of Carroll and his works in line with her own and a lack of self-
promotion (cf. “The Carrollian Tag”) in favor of overall focus on spreading acceptable Alice
material.
The specificity of these community rules defines the Carrollians far more clearly than the
other (many) Alice bloggers on Tumblr. While Phantomwise’s remark that the “Alice in
Wonderland” tag is a mess is perhaps slightly caustic, it is not necessarily untrue: the “Alice in
Wonderland” tag is used frequently, being available to anyone who has even a passing interest in
the subject, used to reference media only barely related, such as the Jefferson Airplane song “Go
Ask Alice”, or signal personal experiences the user is relating to Alice. The top blogs listed as
using this tag are often populated by “dark Alice” fans, largely using material from graphic
novels and American McGee’s computer game. However, using the Carrollian tag requires
insider knowledge. This factored into my decision to analyze these bloggers in particular – their
community stood out amongst other Tumblr blogs devoted to Alice as they made a specific effort
as a group to distance themselves from the greater mass of Alice-related media. Phantomwise
and Golden Afternoon and, in fact, many of the Carrollians, have customized blog themes
57
(unlike many Alice blogs not a part of the Carrollian group), leading to easier visibility and
57
A blog layout designed by themselves or a third party, sometimes for money, rather than the
standard ones provided by the site. This allows for customization of the blog’s appearance more
so than the standard, free options for tumblr users.
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comprehension of the content of their blogs. Many of the users who blog about Alice who are not
Carrollians employ standard layouts in dark colors and are harder to follow visually. The
Carrollians are more interested in establishing indexical features, such as “Lewis-Carroll”’s
tagging system explained above. Phantomwise has a tendency to post content most frequently on
Wednesdays, leaving the other days of the week for answering questions, working on other blogs
and, presumably, her life outside of Alice fandom. There is a professionalism to this organized,
well-researched approach to blogging that sets these users apart, as well as their active efforts to
reach out to other members within their community.
In a way, the subset of the Alice fandom I examined allows only “safe” Carroll media,
and ostracizes “unsafe” users. There are certainly bloggers and fans who revel in the “dark
Alice” adaptations, but “Carrollian” users only touch on them tangentially, instead focusing on
them as a site of contradiction to what they view as the “real” meaning of the books. The form of
the Alice narratives is not as important as the content: all forms are accepted, photographed,
turned into gifs
58
and shared. While users may not like one iteration or another, they clearly
argue their case as to why not, and allow that the relative quality of an adaptation is a question of
individual taste and interpretation of the Alice books; for instance, Phantomwise refuses to post
images from Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland because she feels it is “missing the point of the
books: not to have a story” (“Why Don’t You Post Tim Burton’s Alice”); even so, she does not
impose the same restriction on her Tumblr friends. As long as the rules of acceptable content are
maintained – Carroll was not a pedophile, plot is not a necessity – any form of Alice adaptation
or commentary is valid. Only when the purity of Carroll’s original is undermined do arguments
break out. In a way this blog displays a similar kind of purity dynamic towards Carroll the author
58
“Gifs” are moving images, sometimes with captions, colored and uploaded by users. The name
originates from the document suffix this type of data is saved as.
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as it does toward Alice. Carroll becomes associated with an icon of childhood, and thus must
remain undamaged. Alice, as we have seen, is rendered innocuous in most adaptations, which
insist on her purity and simplicity. Little attention is paid to her subconscious as the source of
Wonderland, while Wonderland itself is often foregrounded as a threat. In a way, this mirrors
Stanley Fish’s views on how interpretive communities are formed: “There is no single way of
reading that is correct or natural, only “ways of reading” that are extensions of community
perspectives” (Fish 16). This is very true of the way in which Carrollian bloggers assert the
structure of their community: they acknowledge a multiplicity of readings, but are very clear to
establish which of these are acceptable within the community.
As Wilson and Peterson state in “The Anthropology of Online Communities”, “a debate
has continued about whether online, virtual, or otherwise computer-mediated communities are
real or imagined” (Wilson 456). A case can be made for the Carrollian’s community to be
accepted as real, in that they make conscious, active efforts to explain what they themselves view
as the rules of their community. Especially as Wilson and Peterson go on to discuss the fact that
most individuals reside between several communities they are a part of, forming online groups
by means of “shared communicative competence and repertoires” (Wilson 459), the Carrollians
set themselves apart as a group with a vested interest in all iterations of Alice, as well-informed,
more-than-casual aficionados who often spend more time and energy on their research than some
of the sources they cite
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. Their interest runs deep, involving both community ideals as well as
“correct” and “incorrect” ways to interpret the urtext, as well as deeply personal connections to
the material. The demands of these users are to abandon interpretation when it leads to
negativity, to maintain affection for the urtext of Alice and essentially to remain true to Carrolls’
59
At least in their estimation.
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desire for no didacticism to touch his text. Deep involvement with the text and with the norms
they want to uphold around its interpretation make Carrollians not only bonded by the collective
speech community formed through their specialization and interest, but also aligned with one
another on an ethical or moral level.
As we have seen, in Victorian times, the focus of critical reception of the Alice books was
on educating children and increasing the sense of whimsy in children’s literature, adapting to a
literary and artistic environment enamored with an ideal of innocent childhood, bloggers of the
21
st
century are reacting to an entirely new set of paradigms surrounding these ideas. Following
Disney and the commodification of childhood, as well as the explosion of critical theory on the
subject of child-rearing and psychoanalysis throughout both popular culture and academia,
leading to the perhaps unhealthy focus on pedophilia that critic James Kincaid points out, the
Carrollians seem to represent a form of cultural backlash. Over and over, they emphasize that the
real crux of Alice is a girl having a strange dream. The main cause for its creation was that
Carroll wanted to please a little girl he whom he had (platonically) befriended. In an almost
structuralist plea, the Carrollians are asking Carroll’s and his adaptors’ modern audiences to take
his work and his life as face value and not to become mired in the controversies (introduced
later) now surrounding them.
The sense of protectiveness of fans towards their hobbyhorse is by no means unique to the
Alice fan community. Already in 1992, Constance Penley noted this propensity in her article
studying Star Trek fan communities, “Feminism, Psychoanalysis and Popular Culture". At the
time when this article was written, fans interacted by selling transformative works to each other
and mailing typewritten fanfiction to each other. Penley’s research in this much larger
community took place at Star Trek conventions and in person; she analyzed a phenomenon more
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recognizable as ‘popular culture’ than Alice. By contrast, many modern Carroll fans are far more
interested in academic discourse than the counterparts Penley discusses. They have been exposed
to the original Alice books almost as an art object. Their approach to the urtext they are interested
in is certainly reminiscent of Penley’s analysis, however, as their readings are based in the detail-
oriented knowledge of “the canon universe” (Penley 489); it is explicit in the Alice fandom that
core participants are expected to have a certain expert’s knowledge on Carroll’s biography and
writings, as well as a familiarity with the full breadth of merchandise and adaptations
surrounding the books. While some fanfiction authors who write for multiple audiences have
only a passing interest in one variation of Alice, the Carrollian bloggers, who create largely
image-based content and consume image, film and text relating to Alice have an in-depth
knowledge of all areas of Alice adaptation and interpretation.
Where Penley describes her informants as being proud of their accomplishments as writers
and artists, as well as fearing misrepresentation (cf. Penley 485), a similar, but slightly different
paradigm is true for Alice fans. They are proud of their own and each others’ still images and
gifs, as well as the collections of Alice materials they display through photography
60
. However,
their fear of misrepresentation is not necessarily directed towards themselves as interpreters and
producers. When I approached them and asked if they would take a survey, they were interested,
even enthusiastic, about the idea of an analysis of transformative works in relation to the Alice
fandom. Penley’s informants, by contrast, were worried she could not portray their interest
without intrinsically judging or othering them. Among Carrollians, the fear of misrepresentation
most frequently shown is the fear that Carroll’s life and works will be misinterpreted. Partially
60
One user has their own website dedicated to their collection of Alice works
(http://maayancd.wix.com/the-cheshire-cat
) which has been reblogged by many of the
Carrollians
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this could be because Penley’s informants were creating transformative works which radically
subverted the canonical urtext of Star Trek and were fairly sexually explicit. Carrollians, as has
been established, are very keen on maintaining the canon as they see it, unsubverted. The
positioning of themselves as conservators and crusaders for a misunderstood text gives
Carrollians more of a socially acceptable footing as fans, transferring the fear of
misrepresentation from themselves onto their too often misunderstood urtext.
This is not to say that Alice fans are perceived, or think they are perceived, as residing
entirely within the cultural mainstream. The intensity of their relationship with the text almost
prohibits this. Henry Jenkins’ description of the way fandom is perceived as “false worship” (cf.
Jenkins, Textual Poachers 15) has some grounding in the mode in which fans discuss their
urtext. For one, the collection of material comprising the urtext is commonly referred to as “the
canon” (Penley 489). Carrollians don’t necessarily use this term to describe anything beyond the
actual text of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, yet I would
contend that the urtext of their fandom comprises both the fictional texts and the rest of Carroll’s
writings, his diaries, letters and the primary source material documenting his life. All of these
collected writings are treated similarly to a canon; they are the source of all knowledge on the
topic of Alice, and more than that, only they are the source of authority on the topic. This is true
for the case of Phantomwise and her repeated, impassioned pleas for Carroll enthusiasts to read
the primary sources themselves so they will not only be convinced of her position but understand
that it is the only position on Carroll’s life and work. This is also true for the Carrollian
Ravenwitch, who has a personal blog not dedicated to anything in particular, but heavily
featuring Carrollian material – she posts images of the Alice narrative from film and drawing, but
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the only secondary material on the subject to be found is analysis reblogged from her
compatriots. This is an intentionally closed, self-referential world.
The relationship between “Carrollians” and the material they are interested in is
essentially one of maintaining the text itself is the only valid source of invention and revision. At
the same time, this text has only one correct factual interpretation (a little girl has a strange
dream; Carroll was not a pedophile) though artistic reinterpretations can be formally varied as
long as they maintain the “correct” content. In essence, these Alice fans adhere to a
fundamentalist position: the original word of the author is the only authority acceptable. Where
Roland Barthes reveled in the literary texts’ “multiplicity” (Barthes 148) questioning the role of
authorship in deciding what a text might “mean”, “Carrollians” long for “a final signified, to
close the writing” (Barthes 147); they long for a knowable intent and a knowable author, not an
ill-defined space between the written and the read. Paradoxically, all of their energy and
imagination as producers of transformative works is directed toward shoring up a canonical
approach to both Alice and Lewis Carroll.
As I have shown, Alice comes into modernity in a number of ways. Strikingly, the book
enters popular consciousness most forcefully in film format, with fans growing attached
especially to the Disney version of the story before they reach for the original book. In doing so,
a transition or dialogue is created between image and linguistic text. Film serves as an
introductory medium, an artifact viewed for pleasure and while it is capable of being analyzed as
such, the primary interaction for Alice fans with film is one of nostalgic longing for one’s own
childhood. Interacting later with the book, however, it is not only the fans’ own childhood they
become nostalgic for, but rather the one they have seen portrayed in film over the years. The
book becomes more accessible the older the audience and the more the complex relationships
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among author, child reader and adult reader are understood. Engaging with Carroll’s text is
immediately situated within these structures, arguably tainting the nostalgia tied to the films.
Such tainting, I would argue, is what fans try to avoid through their repeated protestations of
Carroll’s innocence. Alice is defined by this particular interpretive community’s desire to see
mirrored its own concept of childhood. This is an imagined purity directly attributable to 20
th
century fantasies of Victorian childhood, but the interpretive community does not want to
acknowledge that. Instead, the “Carrollians” create a self-sustaining cycle in which Alice mirrors
childhood as they see it but is credited with defining childhood.
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Conclusion
Over the course of this project, I have examined the following question: Why do we still
care about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland? By rights, a work containing so many references
to its contemporary context ought to appear dated to us now. By rights, it ought to seem entirely
unsuitable for children, who might not even understand the term “Victorian England”, let alone
oblique references to it in poetry. Nonetheless, here we are, a century and a half later, and Alice
is alive and well in popular consciousness. Carroll’s original book exists in literature, both in its
original form and in literary works retelling the story. It exists in film, both as “straight” book-to-
film adaptation and as transformation of the books into films intended for an adult audience.
Finally, exists in the context of fan communities as a continually relevant, continually reread and
reimagined phenomenon.
Alice achieves its mercurial status via a number of different avenues. Firstly, the
circumstances in which Carroll wrote Alice mean that the books originated at the beginning of
the tradition of children’s literature. This gives them status both as a formative part of that genre
as well as specificity to the historical circumstances of the Victorian era. Beyond the broad scope
of context, Alice is also a personal story, written by Carroll for Alice Liddell, beginning as a
fanciful story he told her off the top of his head. Both the time period and the circumstances of
the story’s first telling have become fictionalized in the interim 150 years, allowing Alice an
origin myth of sorts. I argue that it is this fictionalization of the circumstances surrounding the
text which mean it has become understood as an innately adaptable source, indeed, a source
which is more authentic in adaptation than in original.
The origins for Alice’s adaptability are only one side to the history thereof – the other
factor I have highlighted in causing the wealth of Alice material is the importance of visual
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culture. While in Carroll’s time, photography was a very new medium, one he himself was very
interested in, the 20
th
century meant a movement of popular audiences away from literature and
towards film. Given that Alice was, from the first handwritten edition Carroll gave Alice Liddell
for Christmas, always imbued with illustrations, this book in particular has been a rich source for
film adaptation. In my opinion, the most popularly influential of these film adaptations was
Disney’s 1951 Alice in Wonderland, and understanding how this film came into being helps to
understand how those that followed it were conceived of.
Nowadays, Alice is possibly more on the radar of popular consciousness than ever. With
more and more material based on Alice becoming available, and the internet providing a means
of connection for fans of any and all versions, interest communities surrounding Alice are no
longer confined to local Lewis Carroll book groups or academic circles. What these fans reveal
about Alice and the role it has played in their lives is that they use it as a depository for their
image of how childhood ought to be, and create a collective nostalgia for a phenomenon that
does not exist in reality based on how they interpret the text. These normative impulses are
visible in readings of the text conveyed by fan communities, and they are visible in the themes
and tropes guiding popular film adaptations of Alice in recent years.
While I am still unconvinced I can fully offer an answer to the question of why Alice is
still popular, given that some measure of the books’ success must lie in the unknowable of the
readers’ emotional reaction to it, over the course of this project I have reached the following
answer: Alice still matters, because by virtue of the unique circumstances surrounding the way
the book was created and the way these circumstances have been interpreted since then, the book
has become an icon for the idea of childhood to an adult audience. As the idea of childhood
changes, so, too, does the idea of the book, and so, too, do the guiding tropes of adaptation.
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Whether or not the book actually contains the notions of this (largely culturally constructed)
concept of childhood has become more or less irrelevant, because interpretive communities
believe they are seeing what is there rather than what they want to see. Similarly, the ‘child’ is
figured as a constant, unchanging idea which is represented by the text. Alice becomes caught in
the paradox in which the interpretation of the text is constantly changing precisely because no
one believes the idea of childhood it has come to represent is changing.
Reading Alice and reading the way it appears in popular media becomes something of a
gauge for how childhood is imagined and what values audiences (especially American
audiences) feel nostalgia for. Alice is not necessarily a mirror in the traditional sense; it is a
distorted mirror, bloating certain aspects of childhood and Victoriana in current estimation and
diminishing others. Alice, I believe, is where film directors, fans, and even casual readers turn to
see themselves through a looking-glass that shows them what they wish they looked like. But
Alice is by no means the only text with a rich history of adaptation; it is by no means the only
text with a striking and unique origin story. In fact, a variety of other texts with similar origins
and similar trajectories have come after it, such as Peter Pan and The Wizard of Oz. Nor is Alice
the only artifact of popular culture which is reformed in the readers’ mind – in a sense, this could
be said of all texts, and has been by thinkers such as Roland Barthes. In my opinion, especially in
context with similar discussions about other texts, Alice remains an important text in
understanding this phenomenon because of the dissonance surrounding what some readers want
to see in Alice and what other readers want to see Alice’s origins. In order to counteract these
inconsistencies, Alice fans become active agents in defining the content of their urtext. In
examining reader response, Alice could be an invaluable tool.
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wonderland-film-adaptations>.
"Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." Wikipedia. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Apr. 2014.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice%27s_Adventures_in_Wonderland>.
"Ask Me." I'm Not Myself, You See. Tumblr, n.d. Web. 20 Sept. 2014. <http://lewis-
carroll.tumblr.com/ask_faq>.
Auerbach, Nina. "Alice and Wonderland: A Curious Child." Victorian Studies 17.1 (1973): 31-
47. Print.
Barthes, Roland. "The Death of the Author." Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang,
1977. 142-48. Print.
Beddor, Frank. The Looking Glass Wars. New York: Dial, 2006. Print. The Looking Glass Wars
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30 Sept. 2014. Web. 3 Oct. 2014. <http://all-in-the-golden-
afternoon96.tumblr.com/post/98802331660/a-bit-of-fun-tropes-commonly-seen-in-alice-
adaptations>.
Brooker, Will. Alice's Adventures: Lewis Carroll in Popular Culture. New York: Continuum,
2004. Print.
Burton, Tim, dir. Alice in Wonderland. Perf. Mia Wasikowska, Helena Bonham Carter, Johnny
Depp, and Anne Hathaway. Walt Disney Studios, 2010. Film.
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"Can I Cite You/Can You Help Me With a Project?" Phantomwise (Down the Rabbit Hole).
Tumblr, 11 July 2012. Web. 18 Sept. 2014. <http://still-she-haunts-me-
phantomwise.tumblr.com/post/27001017242/can-i-cite-you-can-you-help-me-with-a-
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Appendix A
Illustrations and visual portrayals of Alice
Fig. 1: Carroll’s handwritten version of the mouse’s tail/tale
122
Fig. 2: Portrait of Alice in Frederick Rabbit’s house, too large to fit either the house, textually, or
the frame, visually. Her dark hair and serious expression are frequently noted as being different
than subsequent portrayals.
123
Fig. 3: Print version of the Mouse’s tail/tale
124
Fig. 4: Tenniel’s illustration style, more intricate and using more shading than Carroll’s style.
Integrated into the text in many spaces, and though some images have frames, many do not,
allowing for a seamless transition between text and image.
125
Fig. 5: The tenth chapter of Through the Looking Glass Nina Auerbach speaks about, more
heavily image than content.
126
Fig. 6: The eleventh chapter of Through the Looking-Glass
127
Fig. 7: Carroll’s original handwritten manuscript, with illustration of Alice meeting the
caterpillar
128
Fig. 8: Tenniel’s Alice meeting the Caterpillar
129
Fig. 9: Tenniel’s colored illustration of Alice meeting the caterpillar from The Nursery Alice
130
Fig. 10: Disney’s 1951 Alice, voiced by and designed after Kathryn Beaumont, meeting the
Caterpillar
131
Fig. 11: William Sterling’s 1972 Alice, played by Fiona Fullerton, meeting the Caterpillar
133
Fig. 15 (above) and 16 (below): Nick Willing’s 2009 Alice, played by Caterina Scorsone, meets
the Caterpillar
134
Fig. 17 (above) and 18 (below): Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice, played by Mia Wasikowski meeting
the Caterpillar
135
Fig. 19 (top), 20 (middle) and 21 (bottom), Once Upon A Time In Wonderland’s Alice meets the
Caterpillar
136
Fig.
22: Tumblr user Sedgewina’s illustration of Alice meeting the Caterpillar
137
Appendix B
Fig. 1: List of Alice Adaptations in Film and on the Stage
61
; most frequently referenced in the
survey adaptions appear in bold
Title Year Format Description
Alice in Wonderland 1903 Silent film,
black and
white
Directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy
Stow; first film adaptation of Alice.
Only one, incomplete copy still in
existence
Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland
1910 Silent film,
black and
white
Directed by Edwin S. Porter, 10
minutes long
Alice in Wonderland 1915 Silent film,
black and
white
Directed by W.W.Young
Alice Comedies 1923-
1927
Animated
cartoons
Directed and produced by Walt
Disney before he owned his own
company, now in the public domain –
largely notable at the time for
innovations in animation, now
remembered for connection to Disney
Alice in Wonderland 1931 Black and
white film
Directed by Bud Pollard, first talkie
production of Alice. Released a year
before the centenary of Lewis
Carroll’s birth; not very successful.
Produced by Metropolitan Studios
Alice in Wonderland 1933 Black and
white film
Directed by Norman Z. McLeod. The
earliest Alice adaptation to still be in
circulation, featuring an all-star cast,
nonetheless a box office flop.
Distributed by Paramount Pictures
Betty in Blunderland 1934 Black and
white
cartoon
Directed by Dave Fleischer; a seven-
minute short forming part of the
Betty Boop series. Distributed by
Paramount Pictures.
61
The decision which adaptations to include in this list stems from the adaptations listed by
survey respondents as well as notable adaptations listed in secondary sources. The information
on adaptations, i.e. year of release and director, is largely gained from tumblr user
Phantomwise’s entries on the subject the Wikipedia entry entitled “Films and television
programmes based on Alice in Wonderland” as well as further articles on each of the films.
While not necessarily a reliable source, Wikipedia does contain the most complete list of
adaptations. Additionally, the fact that anyone can and does edit Wikipedia articles means that
Alice fans are more likely to have had an impact in the creation of this list.
138
Alice au pays des merveilles 1949 Film with
stop-motion
animation
sequenes
Directed by Dallas Bower and released
in Europe; there was a British edition
in English language but Disney sued
to prevent it being released too closely
in time to their own animated film.
The films were released to U.S.
audiences at the same time; neither did
well.
Alice in Wonderland 1951 Animated
musical
film
Directed by Clyde Geronimi,
Wilfred Jackson, Hamilton Luske,
produced by Walt Disney
Productions. All-star cast of voice
actors. A box office flop, but
remained popular due to continued
presence on broadcast television.
The New Alice in Wonderland
(or, What’s a Nice Kid Like
You Doing in a Place Like
This?)
1966 Animated
TV-movie
Directed by Alex Lovy, produced by
Hanna-Barbara Productions. Rarely
broadcast and not available in retail
Alice in Wonderland 1966 BBC
television
play
Directed by Jonathan Miller, a rarity
in that it avoids adherence to
Tenniel’s illustrations. Included
many famous stage actors and had
music by Ravi Shankar; distributed
by the BBC
Alice of Wonderland in Paris 1966 Film Directed by Norman Z. McLeod. The
earliest Alice adaptation to still be in
circulation, nonetheless a box office
flop. Distributed by Paramount
Pictures
Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland
1972 Musical
film
Directed by William Sterling,
produced in Great Britain. Won
several BAFTAs and is still in
circulation, though it has not been
refurbished and is thus of lower
technical quality; a favorite among
the Carrollians, though not critically.
Alice in Wonderland, an X-
rated Musical Comedy
1976 Adult
film/musical
Directed by Bud Townsend and
produced by Bill Osco, the first
producer of mainstream adult movies.
Eventually bought by 20
th
Century
Fox and edited to obtain an R rating;
still available in retail.
Alice ou la derniere fugue 1977 Film Directed by Claude Chabrol, a loose
adaptation tending more towards
horror and an adult audience.
139
Jabberwocky 1977 Film Directed by Terry Gilliam and
produced by Python Studios, this
fantasy film received mixed but
mostly positive reviews and was
based entirely on the poem “The
Jabberwocky”
Alice in Wonderland 1981 Animated
film
Original title Alisa v Strane Chudes, a
USSR production, with 1982 follow-
up Alisa v Zazerkale
Alice at the Palace 1982 Film of
stage
musical
Directed by Emile Ardolino, filmed
version 1981 stage musical Alice in
Concert, written by Elizabeth
Swados, starring Meryl Streep
Alice in Wonderland 1983 Film of
Broadway
stage
production
Directed by Kirk Browning and
starring Kate and Richard Burton, the
videotaping of this performance was
conducted in a studio and formed a
part of the PBS Great Perfomances
series
Dreamchild 1985 Film Directed by Gavin Miller and
produced in the UK, a film focusing
on Carroll’s relationship with Alice
Liddell with flashback sequences
showing scenes from Alice.
Alice in Wonderland 1986 TV
Miniseries
Four 30-minute episodes written and
directed by Barry Letts, broadcasted
by the BBC
Alice Through the Looking-
Glass
1987 Animated
film
Directed by Andrea Bresciani and
Richard Slapczyniski, the only
adaptation to focus solely on Through
the Looking-Glass. Produced by
Burbank Films Australia.
Alice in Wonderland 1988 Animated
film
Directed by Rich Trueblood and
produced by Burbank Films
Australia, a tie-in to the previously
released Alice Through the Looking-
Glass.
Alice (Nêco z Alenky) 1988 Film with
stop-motion
animation
sequences
Directed by Jan Swankmajer, a
somewhat darker, more surrealist
take on Alice. One of the few Alice
adaptations received well by critics.
Produced by Channel Four Films.
Adventures in Wonderland 1992-
1995
Musical TV
series
A Disney Channel original
production based on the 1951 movie,
now with live-action instead of
140
animation. The original run was
composed of 100 episodes.
Alice in Wonderland 1995 Japanese
animated
film
Directed by Toshiyuki Hiruma
Takashi, direct-to-video short film
musical adaptation of Alice.
Alice in Wonderland 1999 Television
film
Directed by Nick Willing, this two-
part TV special featured an all-star
cast and received four Emmys.
Broadcast on NBC, a subsidiary of
Comcast (in turn owned by GE).
(Full description below)
Phoebe in Wonderland 2008 Film Directed by Daniel Barnz,
independent film produced by Red
Envelope Entertainment about a girl
with Tourette’s syndrome appearing
in a school production of Alice in
Wonderland
Alice 2009 Television
Miniseries
Directed by Nick Willing, released
first in Canada and then on the
SyFy channel (owned by NBC, see
above). A darker and “more adult”
adaptation of the source material,
more closely related to science
fiction. At the time it was the most-
watched show on SyFy, though it
received mediocre reviews
critically. (Full description below)
Malice in Wonderland 2009 Film Directed by Simon Fellows and
distributed by Sony, a dark version in
which Wonderland is full of crime
and corruption. Not widely known,
those reviews it did receive were not
good.
Wonderland 2009 Musical Written by Frank Wildhorn and Jack
Murphy, specifically for the Tampa
Bay/Houston scene and only
produced on Broadway in 2013.
Received mixed critical reviews
Alice in Wonderland 2010 Film with
CGI
animation
Directed by Tim Burton, this
version has an adult Alice in an
adult Wonderland as a savior;
adapted to create more classic
fantasy stakes and tropes. Won a
number of awards including two
141
Oscars and did very well at the box
office; critically received fairly
mixed reviews. (full description
below)
Alice in Murderland 2010 Film Directed by Dennis Devine, a low
budget horror film taking place at an
Alice-themed costume party that
received uniformly terrible reviews.
Nonetheless has a fan following.
Once Upon a Time in
Wonderland
2013-
2014
TV series A tie-in to another ABC (a subsidiary
of Disney) series, Once Upon a Time,
this show follows the same logic,
which is that the characters and
universes of multiple Disney movies
connect to one another. Cancelled
after one season – poor rating despite
decent reviews.
Sherlock Through the Looking
Glass
2013 Stage play Written and directed by Gus Krieger,
received poor reviews and has not
been widely adapted.
Then She Fell 2014 Theater
performance
Directed by Zach Morris, Tom
Pearson, and Jennine Willet; and
immersive performance piece taking
place in New York until the end of
2014.
Red Kingdom Rising 2014 Film Horror film centering on repressed
child abuse with themes and
characters from Alice as symbol
thereof directed and produced by
Navin Dev, received decent reviews
but has yet to make an American
debut.
142
Descriptions of relevant adaptations
1. Alice in Wonderland (1999) (Dir. Nick Willing)
Nick Willing’s first foray into adapting Alice, this television movie is notable for its
attention to detail and faithfulness to the books. As a consequence of this and the format it was
produced in – a Hallmark entertainment product – the target becomes a family audience. This is
evident perhaps most obviously in that the protagonists remains a child; the more adult-oriented
2009 and 2010 versions cast Alice as an adult. It also evident in that what effort is made to write
in an overarching plot into Carroll’s episodic tale is significantly less dramatic and
overwhelming than it is in the more adult versions.
Alice appears at least several years older than the book’s seven years, and, much like
Disney’s Alice, she is on a quest. It is not to find the White Rabbit though; rather she
consistently claims to be searching for the beautiful garden she saw through the small door just
after falling down the rabbit hole, but is unable to access at first. The search for this garden
becomes her talking point with most of the characters she encounters, though it quickly becomes
evident she is looking for it primarily as a place to hide. The driving “plot” of the movie is Alice
overcoming her stage fright and being able to perform at her parents’ garden party; translating
Carroll’s poetry into song and featuring most of Wonderland as performers of some sort. The
movie culminates in her overcoming her anxieties and standing up in the trial of the Knave of
Hearts, choosing to grow larger by eating the mushrooms she still had from the run-in with the
Caterpillar, not involuntarily growing as she does in the book. When asked by the White Rabbit,
she says “Yes, I am confident”, to which the Rabbit replies, “Then you don’t need us anymore”,
clearly stating the theme of the movie.
143
2. Alice (2009) (Dir. Nick Willing)
The basic idea of Wonderland Willing presents in this 2009 miniseries is that, much as in the
real world, 150 years have passed and Wonderland has developed a market economy based
literally on the opiate of the masses. The Queen of Hearts runs a casino in which the Walrus and
the Carpenter, refigured as research scientists, drain the positive emotions inspired by winning
from kidnapped humans from the real world they refer to as Oysters. These emotions are then
bottled and sold. During an exposition sequence fairly early on, Hatter, who figures as both a
guide and a love interest for Alice, explains that the Queen “controls people with a quick fix”. In
the same sequence, one of the many uses for the iconic poetry from the books is revealed; in
order to gain access to the resistance headquarters, Hatter and the gatekeeper, presumably a
stand-in for a figure from the library sequence in the book, recite lines from “How Doth the
Little Crocodile”. Coming hot on the heels of Hatter’s revelation that the Alice of the books, who
in this version was also real and brought “the whole house of cards tumbling down” during her
visit, this showcasing of the changing function the verse has serves as a nod towards the
adaptation of Carroll’s source material; the once silly and frivolous poetry becomes a symbol for
the resistance to oppression. With many of the book’s most iconic lines and moments, the
adaptation reappropriates them in far more sinister contexts. For example, the March Hare,
known for readers of the book only in conjunction with Hatter, is now the Queen’s assassin –
whom she had executed, and is now brought back to life as a sort of cyborg. The connection
between Hatter and March Hare remains largely unexplored, but towards the end of the third act,
whilst being tortured by March Hare, Hatter spouts out a series of quotes from the Mad Tea
Party, without context and relevant to nothing except the meta-text of Alice as a cultural
institution. The subtle references continue throughout as a sort of easter egg for Alice veterans,
144
e.g. naming the kidnapped people “oysters” and the scientists the Walrus and the Carpenter,
Alice’s insistence that Jack (the Knave of Hearts, also a love interest) is innocent in an entirely
different context than the book’s trial (though there is a trial), and the Dormouse’s tendency
towards falling asleep in the cumulative minute and a half he is on screen. As with many
adaptations, it is watchable without the background knowledge provided by familiarity with the
source material, but it is assumed there will be background knowledge. The key characters and
iconic lines must pop up, not necessarily because they serve a narrative purpose but because
“these are regarded as iconic elements without which the story would seem lacking” (Brooker
205).
Willing’s 2009 Alice herself is not the Alice of the books, a key departure. The question of
identity is always central in an Alice adaptation as the caterpillar must always ask who she is; in
the book, she “hardly know[s]” because she has “changed several times” (Carroll 49) that day,
referring to her multiple changes in size. In the 1951 Disney movie and Willing’s 1999 Hallmark
movie, both simply adaptations of the books rather than continuations, this portion of dialogue is
repeated almost verbatim. In Tim Burton’s 2010 film, something of a sequel, Alice is also grown
up, but she is the same Alice and must convince the denizens of Wonderland (here Underland)
and, more importantly, herself that she had been there as a little girl. Willing’s Alice on the other
hand is a martial arts instructor from the present day. Her name often causes a reference to the
“Alice of legend”, but unlike Burton’s Alice, this does not mean she is expected to fulfill a
prophecy of any sort. Instead, as the plot slowly reveals, she was scouted out by Jack, part of a
political resistance to his mother, the Queen of Hearts, because the Carpenter is her father who
went missing ten years prior. He then gave her the ring which activates the Looking Glass portal
between worlds, and hoped to start a coup. The shift away from Alice simply as the point-of-
145
view character introducing a new world to Alice as a pawn of sorts in a greater political game
marks two major departures from most adaptations. For one, this version of the Alice story enters
Wonderland through the Looking-Glass. Most other adaptations enters it through the Rabbit
Hole; this posits that Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world are one and the same.
146
3. Alice in Wonderland (2010) (Dir. Tim Burton)
Alice escapes a proposal she is disinclined to accept, and follows the White Rabbit down the
Rabbit-Hole and into Wonderland, following the standard sequence of events almost up until her
third size change, at which point it is revealed she is being watched. She runs into a whole host
of mixed Wonderland and Looking-Glass creatures in the forest, who claim she is destined to
slay the Jabberwocky. Through a lengthy exposition, the audience learns the Red Queen took the
throne from the White Queen and rules over Wonderland (apparently incorrectly titled by Alice,
actually Underland) as a tyrant. The Red Queen is actually a melding of the Red Queen from the
books and the Queen of Hearts, having mostly metallic card figures as her soldiers, while the
White Queen, who rarely appears in adaptations, has chess pieces. The denouement of the film
features Alice accepting that she is not dreaming up Wonderland – and didn’t as a child – and
accepting her fate of slaying the Jabberwocky. Afterwards, she returns to the real world,
spurning Hatter as a love interest, and proceeds to confront all of her fears and take on a position
in her Father’s shipping industry, rejecting the role society gave her. A sequel is slated for 2016.
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Appendix C
Non-Film Adaptations
1. The Looking Glass Wars
Frank Beddor’s Looking Glass Wars “unabashedly challenges” (Looking Glass Wars) Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland. In this young adult trilogy, the first part of which was published in
2006, Alice Liddell is really Alyss Heart, who is pushed through the pool of tears from
Wonderland into the real world, and is adopted by the Liddell family. She was sent there to
escape the brutal civil war in Wonderland, and after telling Lewis Carroll, a family friend, about
her troubles, she is disgusted to see them turned into a children’s book. Eventually, she returns to
Wonderland, and the remainder of the first book covers her return to Wonderland and ascent as
queen. The further parts of the series show first an attack of the red queen on Alyss’s monarchy
and then a failure of imagination. Imagination is here the source of power, political and military
– Alyss, having the strongest imagination, vanquishes her enemies. The characters are recast as
figures within a military operation; “hatter” and “cat” both become codenames for assassins.
The books spawned a series of graphic novels centered on the Mad Hatter, who is here Alyss’s
chief military advisor with a mysterious past. There are also a number of games, physical, online
and for mobile devices; the franchise has proven fairly popular.
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2. American McGee’s Alice
American McGee’s 2000 Alice is a video game with elements of horror published by
Electronic Arts. The game is set up as a sequel to Lewis Carroll’s books, in which Alice’s house
burned down with her family inside, and as a consequence she was put in an insane asylum.
Here, she is brought back into Wonderland as a teenager to save it (though it is implied she is
also saving herself from insanity). The game takes the form of a series of battles against the
various characters from Wonderland, and by defeating them, Alice hopes to regain her sanity and
freedom. Much like the books, the game follows a series of settings in which Alice battles a
character, though they are all created in a much darker imagining of the worlds. There is a
second part as well, with a third in production.
Bard College Institutional Review Board
PO Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York 12504-5000 Phone 845-758-6822
Date: November 11, 2013
To: Helen Bendix
Cc: Deirdre D’Albertis and Diana Brown
From: Michelle Murray
Re: Reshaping Alice in Wonderland
DECISION: APPROVED
Dear Helen,
The Bard Institutional Review Board reviewed your proposal at our November meeting. Your
proposal is approved through November 11, 2014.
Please notify the IRB if your methodology changes, or unexpected events arise.
We wish you the best of luck with your research.
Michelle Murray
mkmurray@bard.edu
IRB Chair